March 2012 – Backbone.js

Details

Backbone by Paul Garland, on Flickr

Date: Monday 26th March 2012

Time: 7:15pm start to 9:15pm

Location: http://themorrismanpub.co.uk
Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/ptzt5

Theme: Practical Session

 

New Venue

Please note the new venue. It’s our second meeting at The Morrisman. Follow the links above for further information.

At last months meeting, we sampled a selection of the menu and found it to be delicious and excellent value. The beer was pretty good too.

Backbone.js

In the modern web, great usabilty is vital. I believe Ed Yourdon (@yourdon) recently suggested that User Experience is as important a differentiator between websites / services as Transactions Per Minute was in the 90s.

Users are getting more sophisticated and more demanding. Web developers are embracing and pushing the boundaries of client side scripting to:

  • improve responsiveness
  • increase scalability
  • enable great user experiences

This has provided difficulties in the past, Javascript has had it’s challenges – accessibility, performance, cross browser issues and lack of suggested architectures. There have been some great libraries (Prototype, jQuery) to address some of these concerns. I’ve still struggled with how to apply consistent structure to Javascript heavy applications.

Several months ago, I watched Single Page Apps and the Future of History by Michael Mahemoff. It’s a great intro to the subject of Javascript centred web applications and the idea of client side templates, hashbang uri’s and frameworks like Backbone.js.

In this practical exercise I will introduce Backbone.js using underscore templates. Some Javascript knowledge is assumed but we can pair up accordingly. Also, please bring laptops with your favourite Javascript/html/text editor. I’ll be uploading the exercise to GitHub later this week, but will also bring the exercise on a memory stick.

Lightning Talks

As yet (usual!) their are no volunteers for a lightning talk. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Please email the group or mention it at the venue before we start.

Hope to see you there,
Paul Williams

 

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