[pyronicide]

I've done some interesting applications with Backbone.js over the last 2 months or so (for anyone that uses uTorrent, here's one: http://apps.bittorrent.com/ucast/ucast.btapp all in about 800 lines of code, just unzip the btapp file if you'd like to see the source). After trying other things like SproutCore, Cappuccino or Evently, I'll never go back.

I actually ended up being surprised by how backbone changed what I do with javascript. With backbone, you can create views that are really just widgets. For example, if you have a list item, you can create a view specific to that list item. Then, all the events and state for that list item are encapsulated right there. No need to store state in the DOM, you can just fetch it from the model when it happens. This then allows you to bubble events up through the parent views to change the entire page's state. Because of the separation, you really end up having little pieces of javascript that only know about themselves and the whole picture ends up being considerably less fragile and easier to debug.

I'm also a big CouchDB fan. Since backbone models are just documents, the integration with CouchDB is very minimal and you get instant serialization of user state (it really is that easy, to pimp one of my projects: https://github.com/pyronicide/backbone.couchdb.js). There are no server handlers you need to write (hell, don't forget you don't even need to run a web server, Couch'll do that for you!) and you end up with less complexity overall.

[badmash69]

Could you share how you implemented unit testing your backbone controllers' javascript code?

[pyronicide]

Right now, I'm just using qunit + sinon.js. I'm not super happy with it (I'd really like to get to the point where all my development is done via. writing unit tests), but so far it works. Honestly, one of the big advantages of backbone is that because of the structure it forces on your code, unit testing is easier.

Everything ends up being in a small testable chunk that you can stub out the interfaces for and test (see sinon.js, can't say enough good stuff about that). I've also got a small Backbone.sync implementation that just loads test fixtures and returns data from that, allowing me to have a db to test against that's fake and synchronous. With couchdb, all I have to do is take a DB dump of what I want to test, put it into a file in my test directory and I've got instant fixtures.

[leenasn]

Any idea how easy or tough it is to integrate with JSTestDriver? I would like to use backbone for our projects but am finding it tough to implement TDD for Backbone controllers (for models its fine) because of the template. Through tests, I am not able to inject the DOM which is expected by the controller templates. I know this is off topic but if someone can help for the same, it will be great.

Thanks, Leena