w7d1 - Rails + Backbone
Sorry, no witty title today, just the cold hard facts. Backbone is cool as hell, but also confusing. It got more natural by the end of the day, and I’m sure by the end of the week it will be even more so, but for now, it’s a lot to take in. Backbone does a lot of things on the client side that Rails sort of does on the back end. The caveat is that it doesn’t do it quite as smoothly as Rails, and you end up writing a lot of boilerplate code to pull off Backbone’s feats. In some ways it’s nice, because it doesn’t hide away a lot of the functionality behind convention like Rails does, which makes the processes easier to follow. The downside is that you end up writing a lot of similar and repetitive code, hard coding in URLs and generally doing things that we had better ways of handling in Rails. And of course, it doesn’t quite have that magical feel that Rails had.
Still, with all that being said, I am still pretty excited to continue this week with Backbone, because it has the potential to make things pretty slick on the client side. Being able to create, edit update and destroy resources without ever loading another page is huge. Being able to handle all server requests asynchronously and repaint an entire page of content seems like it will be a very powerful thing to have on your side, and will enable us to do some really amazing things once we can fully grasp it’s usage.
Let’s see what tomorrow brings..