Tag Archives: MVC

Backbone everywhere

internet, programming, ,

I finally put my newly built Node.js MVC stack on github! You can download it here: backbone-everywhere.

What’s so special about it? Here’s my list of exciting features:

  • Pages are rendered on the Node.js server by Backbone and jQuery.
  • All script resources are bundled by browserify and fileify,  uglified by uglify, and gzipped by connect-gzip for fast loading and deployment on other possible javascript environments.
  • The entire Backbone MVC stack works on the server, and is loaded in javascript enabled browsers to take over from there.
  • The app state is reflected in the url by means of HTML5’s pushState, or using hash notation when not supported.
  • The same app state is regained for non-javascript browsers pulling full requests from the server, so no worries about SEO!
  • All client / server communication is handled by socket.io (ajax is sooo 2009) and subscribed clients are updated with published models.
  • A JSON-RPC service listening to ‘/api’ requests, with an easy to build on service layer. Handy for non-web contexts such as mobile devices.
  • All data is persisted in Redis through an adaptation of mine of backbone-redis, enabling indexing, sorting and  foreign key lookups.

For me this is a whole new approach at engineering web applications, but I think I’ve managed to get a grip on it.
Not only that, it gave me a great impulse to reconnect with the pioneers of tomorrow. Because what I have done was build on top of the stuff from people with great vision.
Big shout out to the open source community, and the people willing and wanting to share. The sum of it’s parts will eventually overcome the current patent trolling paradigm.

What are you waiting for? Dig in!

Node.js is the future of web dev happening now

internet, programming, , ,

Having been a javascript fan since I started working with it a long time ago, I immediately fell in love with Node.js. Having discarded Jaxer earlier as too proprietary, even though it offered a solid mechanism for code reuse on the client, I have now adopted the uber active Node community.

You see, me and my partner decided to build a new and exciting community site/app (of which I have to keep the details secret for now). So when I started designing our new web 3.0 app with accompanying mobile app, I thought about and thoroughly  investigated the possible frameworks out there. We decide to build a single page application that would work in all javascript clients, and would gracefully degrade to server roundtrips when javascript was not available (but also to enable deep linking for SEO). I quickly decided to discard most PHP frameworks for our MVC setup. Not only because of the fact that those were mostly too bloated or complex, but also because it implied having to recode a lot of functionality for the client. Of course I also favor the stateful and event driven possibilities of javascript, so I made the paradigm shift and chose the Node javascript stack.

With all the Node modules out there it is finally possible to create a full MVC framework operating on the server as well as in the client, in the form of backbone.js with the help of bones (a Node backbone server implementation offering code reuse in the client).
And with the help of HTML5’s new pushState, we don’t have to worry about breaking Google’s need for deep linking. (Those looking for an example with gracefully degrading URL’s, take a look at the jquery address plugin.)
More goodies come in the form of the browserify module, enabling us to optimally pack all our resources for client side usage, even all our templates and other static files!

Some more info for those interested:

With regards to storage, we decided to go for Cassandra, since we expect a lot of writes, and a lot of scaling. In the mean time I am hoping somebody will come up with a nice abstraction on top of the new Cassandra CQL language, since there are already some Node modules out there working with it.

Taking sessions into account, I am currently favouring Redis, which also has a nice pubsub layer. But I haven’t investigated that path fully yet.

In the mean time I am working on an iphone demo in Appcelerator’s Titanium. Too bad it doesn’t support all the functionality we need on Android as well.

That’s all for now. I have to try and curb my enthusiasm, as all this goodness may come at the expense of my sanity due to sleep deprivation.