Backbone 101

Today, we worked for the first time on backbone. It was the first time that we were allowed to use many the next and structures that backbone provides us as developers. The interesting thing is that much of the things that we learned in the few past days applied greatly to what we were doing today. I will have to get more into what this is all about and if it seems like I am being unclear it is not because I am trying to be obtruse but because I just do not understand it fully yet on my own.

I think the first thing that I managed to grasp what’s the concept of models and collections. When you are thinking about what is a collection what is a model, it is not something that you see in Rails. Rails there are just models. Collections to me seemed quite unusual. But, as I continue to work with them and struggled with updating the collections and seeing them used to great effect in displaying overall information, I quickly realized that collections are powerful part of the front and development process.

One of the interesting things that I have not seen before in our previous few days were the Backbone routers. A router is kind of like the one in rails, but the difference is that they handle the front end. There is a sort of divide between the URL that is “real” and the URL that is part of the JavaScript, which is marked with a #.

I think it is interesting to see how these parts work together in order to create a working app. However it has been giving me plenty of headaches. It has been tough enough to make Rails itself work fine and dandy. Now I gotta make fine and dandy on the front end too!?! Agh!