by Pamela Fox at HTML5 Texas Conference, Austin, Texas (Deck)

Backbone is one of the most popular MVC frameworks for JavaScript these days, and one of the reasons for its popularity is that its minimal and lightweight. That makes it easy to use in different ways and adapt to different projects – but can also make it hard to learn. In this talk, I’ll start with Backbone basics, and then dive into three different ways that we use it to power the frontends of Coursera.org.

Why use an MVC framework? Website includes: 242 js files, 28848 lines of code & 5-person frontend team. Needed more structure to their code.
Why Backbone?

• Structure
• Modularity
• Persistence Layer
• Common Services
• Best Practices

Backbone is a lightweight model view controller framework. Models use set & get so the framework know what’s going on. Collections group objects together. Views with basic data binding. Router is available, but you don’t have to use it.

Read the rest of Backbone: 3 Ways