Sagar Ganatra's Blog

I've been looking into BackboneJS for quite sometime now and thought it would interesting to build an application using the MVC pattern. Although Backbone provides various components - Models, Collections, Routers and Views; it doesn't provide a framework that can help you to structure the application using these components. While working on this application, I realized that I can separate these components in such a way that they can be made reusable or rather loosely coupled by defining the components in separate files. However, there was an interesting problem that I came across where the Views had a dependency on the Collections to be loaded first and then render the template data. I had read a little about RequireJS that allowed modules to be loaded asynchronously and also in resolving dependency. Thought I would give it a try and see whether it addresses this problem.

After taking a break for a few days and then joining my new employer, I'm writing this long pending post on Routers in Backbone. A Router can be considered as a Controller in a MVC application. Controller in any MVC application defines how the incoming request should be handled. For example, a Servlet in a J2EE application accepts the request and looks into the configuration and delegates the request to one of the handlers.

Another big announcement today. I've joined Myntra.com which is India's largest online fashion store. I've ordered stuff from Myntra a few times in the past and it has always been a great experience buying from them. Now that I'm working with them, I'll buy more :) More importantly it's a new day and beginning of a new journey. I'm all excited about my new job and I hope to learn a lot in coming days. Wish me luck!!

The title says it all. Today was my last working day at Adobe and I've decided to pursue my career elsewhere. I've spent more than three and half years at Adobe, working as a part of the ColdFusion Engineering team. Over the last few years I've learnt a lot from the team, from the ColdFusion community and from many others at Adobe. I've developed interests in HTML5, JavaScript and other related technologies and frameworks and I've decided to pursue my interests.

I've been trying to build a CRUD application using Backbone.js and was able to retrieve a set of records into a collection using the fetch method . To perform other operations i.e. Create, Update and Delete I could always invoke Backbone.sync but I was exploring on the lines where this is performed implicitly. The fetch method sends an implicit GET request on url specified in the Collection, similarly I was looking for other methods that allow you to send POST, PUT and DELETE requests to the url. While I was building this application, I did come across a condition where Backbone was not sending a request. I was finally able to figure out as to why that happened and then it was a simple fix in my Backbone application as well as in the REST service.

From past few weeks, I've been learning Backbone.js in great detail and I think it's a great framework that helps you modularize your code easily. Last week I wrote about ' Model validation in constructor ' and then started to look at Collections in Backbone. The Model objects can be viewed as table rows and the Collection as a table. A Collection can declare the model property and indicate what kind of data it will hold. I was looking into ways in which a Collection can be populated by fetching the model data from the server. One way to do that is to ask the Model to fetch the data and then add the response to the Collection . The other way of doing this is to fetch the Collection data directly from the server i.e. instead of defining a Model you create a Collection by fetching the data from the server. Usually when you send a request to the server, the response data is essentially a collection of objects. In this case you really don't need a Model to be defined.

I've started to look at various Design Patterns in JavaScript and one of most popular Design Patterns in any language is the MVC Pattern. In JavaScript, there are various libraries out there which helps in modularizing the application. However, I've heard a lot about Backbone.js and I thought this would be the right time to give it a try. I've not learnt Backbone completely, but I've gained a good understanding of the Model part of the MVC in Backbone.