Backbone.js 1.1 is out

by calebgilbert • 13 years ago

110 36 13 years ago

bratsche• 13 years ago

For anyone who's looking for the changelog, it's at the bottom of the page so it's easy to miss.

* Made the return values of Collection's set, add, remove, and reset more useful. Instead of returning this, they now return the changed (added, removed or updated) model or list of models.

* Backbone Views no longer automatically attach options passed to the constructor as this.options, but you can do it yourself if you prefer.

* All "invalid" events now pass consistent arguments. First the model in question, then the error object, then options.

* You are no longer permitted to change the id of your model during parse. Use idAttribute instead.

* On the other hand, parse is now an excellent place to extract and vivify incoming nested JSON into associated submodels.

* Many tweaks, optimizations and bugfixes relating to Backbone 1.0, including URL overrides, mutation of options, bulk ordering, trailing slashes, edge-case listener leaks, nested model parsing...

byroot3• 13 years ago

I don't think I'm very picky about versions meanings. But still the first two items are huge breaking changes for a dot release...

If I hadn't left my previous job, It would take me a day or two to upgrade. Even Rails 3.2 => 4 is more straightforward.

look_lookatme2• 13 years ago

I can't speak to the Backbone.js changes, but isn't one of the odd things about Rails versioning the fact that 3.x -> 4.0 is essentially a dot release upgrade, but 4.0 to 4.1 a full version upgrade (many things are deprecated from 3.x to 4.0, and 4.1 will remove them entirely?)

masterj5• 13 years ago

How?

* Made the return values of Collection's set, add, remove, and reset more useful. Instead of returning this, they now return the changed (added, removed or updated) model or list of models.

Given that calling `collection.add(foo)` returned `collection`, when were you ever using the return value for anything? Going forward you might, but I would be very surprised if much if any code was broken by this.

* Backbone Views no longer automatically attach options passed to the constructor as this.options, but you can do it yourself if you prefer.

This might require going through your code base, but it's just adding one line in the `initialize` function:

    initialize: function(options) {
      this.options = options;

Annoying if you have hundreds of views that directly extend Backbone.View, but not something that should take a day to fix?

Am I missing something?

pselbert• 13 years ago

That is precisely why our apps are currently "stuck" on 0.9.10. The upgrade process for backbone is rather painful, as you end up hunting for "undefined" issues all over the place.

Any change that renders my entire application broken should be a major version bump.

roryokane• 13 years ago

Direct link to the changelog you quote: http://backbonejs.org/#changelog

jashkenas4• 13 years ago

Here's a direct link to the actual net changes: https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone/compare/1.0.0...1.1.0#...

danabramov2• 13 years ago

Where can I read more about changes related to nested model parsing and submodels? This is something I had to implement just a week ago, and I resorted to overriding `set`. I wonder if they made it easier, or if there is a builtin support for nested models of some kind.

jashkenas4• 13 years ago

Happy to oblige. There's no built-in convention for it, but you can do something like this:

    parse: function(attrs) {
      this.friends = new PeopleCollection(attrs.friends);
      delete attrs.friends;
      return attrs;
    }

... assuming that friends is an array of JSON objects suitable to be transformed into Person models.

philfreo• 13 years ago

If you want something lightweight I'd go with the approach @jashkenas mentioned. But also might want to checkout:

https://github.com/PaulUithol/Backbone-relational

visarga• 13 years ago

How is Backbone faring against AngularJS these days ?

twodayslate• 13 years ago

or ember.js?

jed_watson• 13 years ago

The opposing philosophies haven't changed - AngularJS really wants you to live in an AngularJS world and is a framework, whereas Backbone is more of a library and can be used to enhance your app (or parts of it) as well as providing structure.

Subjectively, they're both very popular although Angular seems to be growing faster while Backbone has been mature for a while.

If you're comparing them, remember it's apples and oranges - my company used Backbone recently in a mobile app and we loved the flexibility to use the parts that were helpful (Views, Events) without having any enforced application structure. It feels very light-weight but leaves much of the decisions up to the developer (there are frameworks like Marionette that provide more structure if you want it)

On the other hand Angular (or Ember for that matter) is great when you want to use it to drive your entire UI, and makes a lot of sophisticated behaviour easy to set up.

So I'd say they're very different solutions to client-side MV*, and not really competing. You'd use the one that suits your problem and how you want to build your app.

vonseel• 13 years ago

Backbone is so much lighter than these frameworks, it really can't be compared directly. Angular is very popular lately, but you have to do your own research of the available choices and determine which project best fits your needs.

calebgilbert• 13 years ago

"angular or backbone: what are startups using" (blog post and poll)

https://blog.backlift.com/entry/front-end-frameworks

rubiquity• 13 years ago

They try and solve the same problem with different levels of abstraction. I've gone full circle from Vanilla JS, to Backbone, to big monolithic frameworks like Ember and Angular and I've come back to Backbone. I think Backbone provides the right level of abstraction for the problems it solves. Angular and Ember I feel create their own problems.

Nemcue• 13 years ago

Maybe it's just because I haven't gone full circle yet, but working with Ember I really feel I can focus on the domain issues and creating a great app.

With Backbone -- and the bunch of BB extensions (Marionette etc) you need to be productive with it -- I find myself just maintaining and extending massive amounts of boilerplate code.

epidemian• 13 years ago

We were lucky to have jashkenas for a talk last week, and one of the questions he answered was how Backbone compares to Angular and Ember.

One of the key differences in philosophy with Angular is that Backbone tries to separate the UI representation from the core logic of your app by focusing on having rich models (alla MVC). Your models should have meaningful domain-related methods, and they should not know at all about the UI at all. Then have the UI observe those models.

In Angular, while it still draws a line between the UI and the rest of your app, there's not much focus on having rich model objects. However you want to represent your data is up to you, as long as you update the properties of $scope to have the views know about it.

Another key difference is the size of the feature set of each framework. While Backbone tries to give you the basic components for building a JS rich app and lets you decide how to solve no-so-basic things, Angular goes for a more full-featured approach.

An obvious example of this is view rendering. Angular provides templates with data-binding, filters, a way to abstract new "components" though directives and probably much more (disclaimer: i'm not an Angular user). In Backbone, on the other hand, the View#render method is empty, up to you to do whatever you want. You might simply use _.template and $.fn.html, or you can use some library to handle the data-binding (e.g. Rivets.js [1]).

This difference in feature coverage also reflects in the code size of the frameworks. You can totally read, and understand, Backbone's whole source code in an afternoon or probably less.

----

Personally, i'm not fond of the monolithic approach of Angular. In fact, i'd really love to see Backbone taking an even more minimalistic approach and decomposing its components even further: make the events, models&collections, REST handling, views and routing be separate libraries, and have "Backbone" be just a namespace with these things in it.

It's not that opting-out Backbone's specific features is difficult (it's actually very easy, as there's very little magic to what it does). But, for example, i don't think what Backbone provides for dealing with UI (basically, tracking of the DOM element associated with it and listening to DOM and model events... and a dependency of jQuery) is useful if you're going to use some library for data-binding. So, in that case, i'd prefer to opt-out and not even have Backbone.View lingering around. It'd be awesome to be able to do that by just removing a "backbone-views" dependency from the project.json file hehe.

Anyways, i think it's cool to have some healthy competition on this front of web development; there's still much to be polished.

[1] http://rivetsjs.com/

tuxracer• 13 years ago

I think http://chaplinjs.org/ provides a nice happy medium between the two approaches. It extends (does not fork) Backbone objects to solve those no-so-basic things for you. Yet it still keeps the UI as separated from the core logic of your app as much as vanilla Backbone.

Less tediousness than vanilla Backbone and a cleaner separation from UI and core logic than Angular.

nickdoesdesign• 13 years ago

Thank you for putting into words what I have failed to whenever someone asks me why I chose Backbone for our app development over Angular. The lighter wait library and MV* ness of it just made more sense over tying so much to the UI.

jashkenas4• 13 years ago

Gee, that's an unexpected comment -- how refreshing.

As always, the best thing to do is browse through what's actually been done with them, compare the relative quality of the result, and judge for yourself...

http://backbonejs.org/#examples

http://builtwith.angularjs.org

sidcool• 13 years ago

No direct link to Change log. :(

hellosmithy• 13 years ago

http://backbonejs.org/#changelog

Backbone.js 1.1 is out

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