

Backbone Aura Developer Preview - jashkenas
http://addyosmani.github.com/backbone-aura/

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tlack
Looks really interesting and like pfraze I think it's important that we
rethink the way we build our sites and applications; focus on composing
applications out of reusable tiny JS components (widgets) will make them more
robust and easier to develop in the long run, once we get out of the teething
stage of trying to figure out how to structure it all.

That said, the architecture they're proposing here seems a bit convoluted; is
there really no simpler way to package together your widgets than calls that
bounce around to different objects and 'core' methods?

~~~
lowboy
There are many many ways to package and deploy an app. That's a double-edged
sword of the javascript ecosphere right now. For larger apps/projects, I think
that a clean separation of concerns into widgets with a mediator of some sort
is the way to go, and aura establishes such a pattern. Will it fit a blog?
Probably not. But then, you won't even need AMD-style modules for most blogs.

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pestaa
I have a basic grasp of what Backbone is capable of, but can't really tell
what Aura improves on that. At first glance it seems to abstract MVC
constructs away and lets you define those widgets with a single function call.
Is that what this is about?

~~~
ayi
(first of all; sorry for my english) Actually it's not about technical side of
things. It's about paradigms and philosophies. Addy Osmani is trying to apply
enterprise application development patterns to JavaScript. That what i
understand from reading all of his blog posts :)

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fpp
Also have a look at Addy's large scale app demo

<https://github.com/addyosmani/largescale-demo>

and the corresponding slides/talk

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kveykva
Soundcloud apparently has been doing something similar to this -
[http://spadgos.github.com/blog/2012/06/01/soundclouds-
stack-...](http://spadgos.github.com/blog/2012/06/01/soundclouds-stack-slides-
from-fluentconf-and-sfjs/)

~~~
malandrew
Link to video of Nick's longer, more complete talk given at the SFJS Meetup in
this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4062076>

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pfraze
Looks promising. Browser javascript needs good architectural environments, and
these are talented devs.

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phase_9
"Aura is currently missing two important items needed to help us get out a
stable release. These are good unit tests and stronger documentation."

I can understand the lack of documentation, but I balk at the fact that
framework developers wouldn't use TDD to guide the development :(

~~~
mrkurt
I've found that TDD is pretty crappy for exploratory development on things
like frameworks. It's much easier to test once I've hit the point where I know
how everything should look and behave.

~~~
pnayak
Yeah, in my own experience TDD makes a lot more sense when you have something
substantial built.. like say version1 of a product. Doing TDD from the scratch
is a lot more hassle without substantial gains

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bwilliams
Looks awesome. Hopefully some of these features will be pulled into Backbone.

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czzarr
hopefully this doesn't happen. Backbone is fine as it is.

~~~
lucperkins
Well, Backbone as it stands doesn't really allow you to have these kinds of
app-in-itself unities capable of communicating with one another. Clearly, this
isn't for everyone and for all purposes. Backbone is "fine as it is" for
plenty of things, but I would be willing to bet that the Backbone devs will
eventually make these enhancements part of the standard architecture.

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lwm
Developer preview? Thank you very much! git clone.....

