w8d4 - Backache

    Ugh, Backbone… I thought I was doing well yesterday and then Backbone comes along and slings me back down to Earth. I started trying to incorporate Backbone into my project, and it did NOT go as smoothly as I’d hoped. That’s not to say that it was a complete disaster, it was just frustratingly slow and I didn’t get as much done today as I would have liked. With that being said, I made sure not to affect the Rails version of the app, so even if the Backbone parts end up in the trash heap, I can easily revert it back to Rails.

    In particular, I was having trouble with utilizing subviews. I think part of it is just that I’m not very comfortable using them. I have to constantly refer back to previous material to get right, which is a big difference from when I was working in Rails. The other part of it is that conceptually, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around exactly how I need to separate my Views and Templates, as my models are intricately related and there isn’t a clean delineation for what needs to go where. That’s also part of Backbone that I struggle with compared to Rails. In Backbone, there aren’t many conventions that hold things together, you just sort of have to make it make sense the best you can. Rails is ALL conventions, and once you get used to it, it’s nice understanding how things fit together. I’m sure that as I work with Backbone, I’ll start to appreciate the open-endedness of it, but for now, it’s just frustrating.

    Tomorrow is our first demo day, and I’m very excited to see everyone else’s projects in progress. But before then, I would definitely like to get some of my Backbone pieces working. Looks like I have some work to do!