In what follows, we are going to look at Backbone.js routers. Routers are a great place to start whenever you begin developing a Backbone application (or any application for that matter) because you can figure out what URLs and sections your app will need and add hooks in your code to respond to them. It helps define application structure, much like a flow chart would.
The files for demo and download for the following discussion can be found below if you’d like to follow along…
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Backbone.js uses routers to execute certain actions when a user goes to a certain URL within a Backbone application. Backbone applications all use routes that follow a # character in the URL. The # might be familiar to you if you’ve ever used it as a named anchor to link to part of the current document without going to a new URL. This is very prevalent in pages that have tables of content at the top (e.g. like in Wikipedia articles), where the links at the top take you to a place on the same page further down. That’s what’s going to happen with Backbone. We’re going to stay on our same page, but we’re going to set up our JavaScript such that Backbone listens for the user going to these links. When the user clicks on different links within the application, instead of going to a different place on the page, we’ll be executing different portions of JavaScript in our code. That’s how a “client-side JavaScript application” essentially behaves.
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RequireJS according to it’s website is…
…a JavaScript file and module loader. It is optimized for in-browser use, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.
In this section we will walk through some basics on how and when you can use RequireJS and discuss some of the benefits you may get from doing so. Personally, I’ve always thought that RequireJS can be a somewhat confusing concept to wrap one’s head around at first. I think this may have mainly been because a lot of times RequireJS is demonstrated in the context of a big web application project and it can sometimes be difficult to follow what its responsibilities are in the midst of numerous files doing all sorts of different things. So we are going to start off very very slowly (we’re just going to use it to load a couple JavaScript files) and we will look at doing more in depth things later on.
You can grab the demo files below from this tutorial if you want to follow along…
Demo Files
Why Use RequireJS?
Why would you want to use RequireJS? Well there can be a number of reasons but at the bottom of it all the main purposes are to keep your JavaScript nice and organized, fast-loading, and easily extendable. If you are just doing a little bit of jQuery for a bit of enhancement on the front end of a website, then maybe RequireJS is a bit overkill for your purposes. However, the real value of RequireJS comes in when you start to develop larger client-side web applications that have numerous JavaScript files, with different dependencies, all interacting with one another..
Often times, if you look in an HTML document of you’ll see something like the following…
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