Episode 145 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) about his free online book about the Fundamentals Of Backbone.js and how using javascript frameworks can really help when building a front-end Web app. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #145: Bachbone.js Fundamentals with Addy Osmani (MP3, 34:16, 32.9MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Louis chats to Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) about backbone.js. GA_googleFillSlot("InArticle_728x90_1"); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/145. Interview Transcript Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. Today on the show my guest is Addy Osmani who is a JavaScript developer at AOL; he speaks at a number of conferences about JavaScript and about developing larger applications in JavaScript and is the author of a few books. Hi, Addy. Addy: Hi, it’s nice to be on your show. Louis: It’s great to have you. So, the reason that prompted me to reach out to you and try and get you to come on the show is you’ve recently put out sort of a free in-progress book about Backbone.js, is that right? Addy: Yeah, that’s right. Louis: So, before we dive into talking about the book and what prompted you to do this sort of project, I’d like to maybe give the listeners some background on Backbone. So do you want to explain a little bit about what Backbone.js is and what problem does it try and solve, and why would people want to use it. Addy: Absolutely. So, the idea behind Backbone Fundamentals is it’s a book that teaches both beginners and advanced developers how to effectively use Backbone to build more structures to applications. Now, what does that all mean? Well, when you start building with App Stack or non-trivial or begin to grow, you learn that unless you have some sort of organization in place you’re going to end up with some problems. What kind of problems? Well, maintaining all of the code through applications, say a file, without using any architectural design patterns can mean that it ends up looking a little bit like spaghetti; it might look good from the outside, it might taste nice, but it’s a mess to clean up. So, when you’re searching for something a little bit more maintainable, a lot of developers find that applying patterns like MVC, which usually stands for Model View Controller, that means something slightly different on the front end and in JavaScript; that can help them keep their code a little bit more organized. Now, Backbone is one of those frameworks that lets you use the flavor of MVC to cleanly separate concern and organize the application. It’s mature, it’s incredibly lightweight given what you get out of it, and it’s great for single page applications and multi-view applications. Now, there are like a ton of other solutions out in the market at the moment which offer, a bit of a variation of what Backbone does. In my opinion it’s one of the more elegant solutions out there right now. Developers that might be looking at it and saying, well, is Backbone good enough to be used in my large enterprise model application? well it’s currently being used by the likes of LinkedIn, Foursquare, Sound Cloud, and a lot of other large companies that build their applications. Now, they’re not small companies and they’re not building small applications, so hopefully if it’s good enough for them it’s hopefully good enough for the rest of [...]