Announcing Backbone.js: Models, Collections and Views in 2.4kb

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/

by jashkenas • 16 years ago

216 60 16 years ago

documentcloud.github.com

swannodette2• 16 years ago

I got a sneak preview of this yesterday. Having worked on a couple of large-ish JavaScript UI projects this is the kind of thing that people invent over and over again without ever distilling a minimal, extensible, and reusable set of functionality, it's either too application specific or heavily embedded in a larger framework (Cappuccino/SproutCore). MooTools+Backbone.js and/or jQuery+Backbone.js sounds like a killer combo to me!

whalesalad2• 16 years ago

Totally! I can't wait to replace my own internal model classification stuff with this (or at least play around with it in that sense) to go along with jQuery. I've become accustomed to the jQuery way of handling the DOM so it's nice to see something agnostic to that. I'd rather avoid a one-size-fits-all js library to be honest ;)

conesus• 16 years ago

Key point of Backbone.js: This is for designing web apps, not just a web page. When you have multiples of the anything on a page, it's time to move to separating out your views from your models, and Backbone.js is perfect for this sort of transformation. Even better if you start with Backbone.js. And Backbone.js is a minimal set of functionality to get this done.

We use Backbone.js at DocumentCloud for our document workspace. It took a few weeks to pull out all the pieces, but we rely on the JavaScript MVC that Backbone gives us for the entire workspace. (That too will go open-source, someday soon enough.)

I am personally planning on integrating Backbone into NewsBlur, an RSS feed reader, which currently has an ad-hoc model system. Backbone would give it the ability to update stories and feeds without having to remember where all of the stories and feeds are on the page.

Anyway, Backbone takes a bit of getting used to, but it is fairly easy to read the annotated source to see exactly what's happening. And once you do learn the Backbone.js conventions, hard problems become much easier on the front-end.

jdunck• 16 years ago

I'm concerned that the default approach to saving is making a request to the server. Defaults matter, and this default will lead people to ignore the 8 fallacies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput...

N+1 across the internet will suck.

I assume it's early days, but please consider this issue. It's killed a bunch of otherwise interesting libraries.

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

This issue is very much considered. You absolutely don't use this to make a bunch of tiny little Ajax requests to load your application in pieces. Instead, you bootstrap all of the data you need for an initial load onto the page, and then populate the collections directly.

For saving, a single update often needs to be a single request, and the UI needs to know that the update has been applied successfully. If you need to do a bulk update, then use "set", not "save", and make a custom Ajax call for the bulk operation.

Finally, Backbone.sync is the lowest-common-denominator default REST request, which will work for many applications. You can and should override it if you have more specific needs -- using timeouts to aggregate many granular saves into a single HTTP request is a great idea for some applications...

wsbail292• 16 years ago

I really like the approach here of extracting the core functionality of js mvc and data binding without the bloat of a huge framework. I plan on using this on a project soon. Well done jashkenas and co!

toisanji• 16 years ago

This looks very nice. I already use underscore an jquery for all of my projects. I'll try this on my current project and report my findings.

swah5• 16 years ago

Looking for underscore and found this interesting testing page: http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/test/test.html

brunoc• 16 years ago

Currently in the process of refactoring a webapp with a lot of jQuery soup and this looks a lot like how I envisioned my client side models. Looks great!

misterm3• 16 years ago

Sorry, I'm a little late to the party with respect to javascript. Could someone please explain to me what this means in english?

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Yep -- let's dejargonize that for you:

"key-value binding and custom events": When a model changes its state, other JavaScript objects can listen for that change and be notified. It's the usual inversion-of-control pattern, but especially crucial for models and views. A model has no business knowing about what views may or may not currently be present in the UI. Instead, the views listen to changes in the model, and update themselves accordingly.

"rich API of enumerable functions": JavaScript arrays are pretty feature-poor, at least in terms of things that will work cross-browser. Backbone collections include all of these handy functions for working with your data:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Collection-Undersc...

"views with declarative event handling": Instead of creating a mess of nested jQuery "bind" or "delegate" calls, it's nice to just declare what elements in a view should be hooked up to specific callbacks:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#View-handleEvents

"RESTful JSON interface": The persistence strategy for Backbone can be swapped out for something different (Websockets, Local Storage, CouchDB), but the default is to fire off a standard JSON Ajax call when you call "model.save()"...

Hope that helps a little.

misterm3• 16 years ago

Yes it does. Thank you for the explanation.

For anyone unclear about REST, try this: http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife

wsbail292• 16 years ago

It means that Backbone provides a way to cleanly separate your model/data from your presentation such that your model is concerned with synchronizing state with a server and the view is concerned with listening to changes in that model via data binding.

itrekkie• 16 years ago

I'd be interested to know how this compares to js-model (http://benpickles.github.com/js-model/). Anyone have any insight?

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Yes. I recently discovered js-model while wrapping up the Backbone documentation. The two libraries are extremely similar, and share the same core idea, but with that said, here are some of the differences:

* js-model is explicitly inspired by Rails' ActiveRecord models, and a lot of these points fall out from that fact...

* In js-model, a collection and a model class (constructor function) are the same object. This is a big problem in client-side code -- you don't always want to have just a single collection of say, notes. That makes sense in a one-database-per-app, one-table-per-model world, but not so much in JavaScript.

* Backbone sets up the prototype chain so that you can continue to extend (subclass) your Models, Collections, and Views.

* Backbone includes a richer set of enumerable functions, based on Underscore.js, so you get native performance in browsers that support them natively.

* js-model's validation and errors API mimics Rails' Errors object, which may or may not be what you want.

* Backbone includes Views, and js-model sticks to models.

That's just a list of things off the top of my head. It's an amazing example of convergent evolution in code -- and I think it's much more widespread than this. In my experience, many folks who work on big JavaScript projects end up with an internal framework that bears an uncanny resemblance to Backbone.

netghost• 16 years ago

js-model has some nice support for serializing to local storage and so forth baked in, which I've found to be really handy.

Backbone looks like it forms a much more cohesive package though, which is nice.

swannodette2• 16 years ago

Similar but it does seem to conflate the idea of a Model and a Collection. Also the instance changes API in js-model prefers an interface based around instance mutability instead of presenting the old and new value in a functional manner to the callback.

BackBone.js Models are also mutable. This is probably the only part of the design I would have handled differently at the cost of responsiveness in browsers with slower JS engines. In my experience it's too easy to accidentally corrupt the data which populates many UI components if you're passing mutable references around.

ankimal• 16 years ago

Finally MVC on the front end as well and no more custom json objects to keep all your data in one massively redundant and unreadable object.

ericflo• 16 years ago

This looks really nice! I always struggle with my client-side js becoming a tangled DOM mess, and this looks like it could push me towards a much saner path.

swah5• 16 years ago

Would be nice to have a complete minimal web app using Backbone to get the feeling of what you can do with this.

misterm3• 16 years ago

I would like to try to make one just to experiment a little bit; I've never really made a javascript driven website before.

ryandotsmith• 16 years ago

I have made a demo app. See my blog post for code and explanation. http://afewgoodlines.com/post/1329452279/a-backbone-js-demo-...

kreek• 16 years ago

This looks great. I'm primarily a Flex developer and JavaScript for web apps has always scared the bejesus out of me as I felt I was back to the dark days of ActionScript 2. I still feel I'm faster with strong typing and a good IDE (I hardly type anymore it's all code completion) but micro frameworks like this are a huge step in the right direction.

Is there an IDE for serious JavaScript development? Right now for JS work I use TextMate with a bunch of custom tag triggers.

chipsy• 16 years ago

Try using haXe for your JS code. The syntax is extremely close to AS3 and you'll get the static types and classes back, as well as lots of other nifty stuff.

IDE support is still kind of lightweight, but there are several options out there: http://haxe.org/com/ide

I use Geany, because I only really need context-sensitivity, highlighting, and search+replace.

whalesalad2• 16 years ago

Wow I am incredibly impressed by this, great work to the DocumentCloud team! I can't wait to throw this into real-life use... it looks like everything I could ever want in a framework.

I too am a jQuery developer, but not your typical one. I tend to avoid slapping plugins together and write most of my own things from scratch, in my own pythonic classical style. I also tend to use the little jQuery helper methods and CSS selector tools purely as an interface to the DOM. The hard work is all done via classes, which drastically reduces the code that I write. I see other not-so-skilled jQuery script kiddies out there piecing together documents full of $('#blah') this and $('#bloo') that with little regard for chaining or simplifying things. I digress, as that is not the demographic for this wonderful library of code.

Here is an example of what kind of code I have been writing as of late: http://dpaste.de/pKOi/ -- as you can see, there is a small bit if boilerplate required and a 'var self = this' inside of each class method that is required. That's more for my own personal style actually, to help with preventing loss of 'this' scope down the road. Anyway... over time this code just sort of piles up and it would be nicer to 1) have a better way to define and organize it all, and 2) all of the great model/collection/validation stuff looks excellent! Evented programming is brilliant to, and the fact that a thousand pieces of code can all stay in sync thru events is just fantastic.

simplegeek• 16 years ago

I'm a JavaScript newbie. I'm just curious as to how your code (as shown in dpaste.de/pKOi) is better than Douglas Crrockford's module pattern? Please enlighten me,thanks for help.

jacobolus• 16 years ago

Basically he’s just using JavaScript’s built-in objects and making the initializer function call the prototype's init. The advantage vs. Crockford’s "module pattern" is that if you plan to make many instances, the functions don’t all need to be recompiled every time, or take up extra memory.

I would advise the GP poster to pick up some class implementation (or roll his own), and use some bind function instead of all the `self`s (if only because other JavaScript programmers will recognize the style better). One that seems to work reasonably well for simple use cases is John Resig’s suggestion, http://ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance/ though one thing to keep in mind with that implementation (just as with the poster's) is that new instances must be created with `new`.

That one is supposedly inspired by base2: http://code.google.com/p/base2/source/browse/trunk/lib/src/b...

However you decide to do it, the prerelease versions of Resig’s upcoming book are quite helpful in understanding how these designs work and all the tricky corners of JavaScript closures and object inheritance.

apl• 16 years ago

Great framework, terrifying logo.

tkaemming• 16 years ago

It's somewhat hidden on the project page, but I love the annotated source view: http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone.html

Edit: It looks like it's taken straight from the source (http://github.com/documentcloud/backbone/blob/master/backbon...) using Docco: http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/

grayrest• 16 years ago

Thanks for releasing this DocumentCloud. I've been ranting about bound models with jQuery for months. It's nice to throw away the start I've made and use someone else's code.

slantyyz• 16 years ago

This appears to be similar to choco.js (sammy.js, jim, js-model) but much more lightweight?

swah5• 16 years ago

So if we were designing the Twitter front page with Backbone, we would have models like TrendingTopics, WhatYouDoing, NewMsgs and some more. They would be updating against the server using JSON, and calling some render code so they redraw themselves when there is new data.

If we didn't have Backbone, we would probably call a main JSON sync function repeatedly, and iterate on this new data updating the different parts of the page "manually".

Is that it?

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

A more apt comparison is the "new twitter" homepage. If you load it and keep an eye on your Ajax requests, you'll see something like this:

http://cl.ly/b043f31cd91dfdac8918

There, Recommendations, Friends, Followers, and Memberships are the models, and render off the contents of that JSON. Of course, Twitter should really be bootstrapping all of those bits of JSON into the initial page load, instead of firing off six requests immediately...

swah5• 16 years ago

Thanks, and yep I meant newtwitter. (How long until we can call it twitter? :)

silverlight2• 16 years ago

I'm a little confused about what the best-case/ideal scenario is for this.

As an example, I am currently working on a project that has a basic profile page. So on the server side, I have my nice OO representation of a Profile object, complete with properly defined public and private variables, a slew of functions, and a save() function that validates saves the data to the database.

When I display that page to the client, I have a PHP view which takes the data from the model and then renders it. In the view, I do currently use jQote2 to do some basic client-side templating where appropriate (for example, displaying all of the friends of the profile's user).

Now, the Profile page features the ability to edit profile fields. There is jQuery involved here. Currently, I just have a function that is called when the "Save" button is clicked that gathers up all the various data from my input fields and whatnot, and sends that off as JSON to be saved on the PHP side of things.

Is this someplace where Backbone.js would make sense? Would I then have to have a representation of my model both in PHP and in Javascript? And my PHP view would contain several Javascript sub-views? And when I do save the model on the Javascript side of things, am I then just executing database queries on the PHP side, or am I re-loading the model, changing the attributes, and then using the PHP model's save() function?

I guess I'm just confused as to where this fits into the grand scheme of things. There's a part of me that certainly likes the idea of data binding and having smart re-rendering of parts of my pages based on when models change, but I'm just unclear on how this fits into my existing PHP MVC stuff.

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Backbone is intended for JavaScript-driven web applications. If you're doing most of your logic and HTML rendering on the server-side, then it's not appropriate for you.

However, if you have an application with a lot of JavaScript interactivity, or a single-page application where the entire interface is driven from JavaScript (this is the case for us), then it helps to structure your client-side code with a little more oomph than just jQuery provides.

Taken to the extreme, in our case, the DocumentCloud workspace is effectively an empty body tag, and all of the HTML rendering and interesting logic happens in JavaScript models and views -- you never have to refresh the page. The server-side Rails code becomes smaller and less complicated, essentially delegated to performing validations and authentication and serving JSON to the client. Think GMail, or New Twitter, or 280 Slides...

silverlight2• 16 years ago

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

So basically this is for those folks who are making real "web applications" -- meaning applications where a lot is happening on the client side, typically more of a "single URL/page", with dialog boxes and whatnot as opposed to a bunch of pages in the more traditional "web site" sense.

I have often considered trying out Cappuccino, but for some reason none of the websites I build end up being "web applications" in this sense. But I can't help but wonder if that's because they aren't, or if it's because I'm not thinking about them the right way.

It's outside the scope of this topic, but I can't help but ask: "How do you know when a website becomes a web application"? Is it the scope of the problem (trying to do "one thing", e.g. edit a photo, vs. presenting an entire web site full of information?) Or is it truly just a preference thing? I can only think that as projects like Node.js gain prominence, the lines will continue to be blurred...

bobfunk• 16 years ago

Looks great - imagine that it would be a perfect companion to something like sammy.js

niels• 16 years ago

Yep, I'm wondering the same... Sammy has routes, but no real models structure. So I assume the two don't overlap too much?

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Yes, they could work together quite well.

However (and this is another conversation altogether), I don't think that you really want to structure your client-side application around faux-routes. Maintaining browser history with "hashchange" is important, but hardly the central aspect of a JS app. Usually you want to reserve history changes for special states that deserve to be bookmarked, not for every single action performed.

For the record, this is the little module that we use to record and listen for "hashchange" events:

http://gist.github.com/624773

swah5• 16 years ago

Can you please expand on this? I don't get it: do you think something like newtwitter is badly designed because it uses faux-routes? If you don't have faux-routes then how can you easily insert links which will "go to page X" ?

tickle_me_elmo• 16 years ago

Would it be possible to use this with Google App Engine?

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

It's just a JavaScript library -- I don't see why not.

jvinet• 16 years ago

Another approach, though more alpha in code/docs:

http://github.com/jvinet/jive

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Just pushed out a minor update for Backbone 0.1.1: If you define an "initialize" function in your Model, View or Collection class, it will be now invoked when an instance is created.

navyrain• 16 years ago

Any plans for a tutorial down the road?

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Yes, there is. We're working on one actively.

k7d• 16 years ago

Maybe I missed it but is there any kind of offline support? Ie. What happens when update to server fails? Or it's completely up to the developer?

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Offline support is up to the developer -- there are many applications where the notion doesn't make sense: imagine an offline Google or and offline Twitter. But having nice logical models certainly helps organize an offline application.

The first thing you would do is override Backbone.sync to save your models to Local Storage instead of the server:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#Sync

boothead2• 16 years ago

Awesome! Any plans to integrate this with coffeescript? I see someone's already taken a stab at it: http://gist.github.com/625893

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

It's just JavaScript, so they should work together fine:

    Todo = Backbone.Model.extend
      
      done: ->
        @get("status") is "done"

      toggle: ->
        @set status: if @done() then "active" else "done"

Doing a quick Backbone.coffee version would be fun though, hmm...

boothead2• 16 years ago

TBH I was a little surprised that you didn't write this in coffee in the first place :-)

Isn't this the kind of thing that coffee would be aimed at?

ez77• 16 years ago

At the risk of making a faux pas, could anyone share the .js and .html files of a very simple example?

oozcitak• 16 years ago

This is not specifically about Backbone. How do you provide content for web crawlers/searchbots with a client framework?

jashkenas16• 16 years ago

Frequently, JavaScript-heavy applications are for individual use: think GMail, Basecamp, or Google Docs -- none of which need to be indexed by web crawlers.

But if you are doing something public facing, you can get it indexed by Google with a little elbow grease:

http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...

"New Twitter" takes this approach.

Announcing Backbone.js: Models, Collections and Views in 2.4kb

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