ngBackbone

ngBackbone is a small extension of Backbone.js that unlocks Angular-like programming experience

Well, I love old good Backbone for its simplicity and flexibility. However after working with such frameworks as Angular and React, I see that Backbone app requires much more code. Yet I don't want to ditch Backbone and deal with some 20K LOC framework codebase. I just want a minimal modular extension that will improve my programming experience and maintainability of my code. And that is how I came up with ngBackbone

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Motivation

Angular inspired live templates via ngTemplate
Separation of declarative (@Component + template) and impreative programming
1-way and 2-way binding
Testable views
Control over nested views
Asynchronous form validators (e.g. server-side validation)
Debauncable form validators
Fluent TypeScript programming experience

What does it do?

ngBackbone extends the base with:

@Component decorator encapsulates declarative from imperative part of the view
View module binds specified models/collections to the view template (makes the template reacting on data events)
FormView creates state models for controls per a specified group and binds them to input/change event. FormView keeps these models in sync with element ValidityState and can run custom validators on input events.

Ng.Backbone does not depend on jQuery or Underscore, meaning you can use on an optimized build of Backbone. For example, my preferred build consists of Exoskeleton (Backbone decoupled from Underscore), Backbone.NativeView (Backbone View decoupled from jQuery) and Backbone.Fetch (Backbone.sync leveraging Feth API instead of XHR) Though Ng.Backbone works fine with canonical Backbone bundle (Backbone + jQuery + Underscore)

What does it look like?

import { Component, FormView } from "backbone-ng/core";
import { HeroPowers } from "./Collection/HeroPowers";

@Component({
  el: "ng-hero",
  events: {
    "submit form": "onSubmitForm"
  },
  collections: {
    powers: new HeroPowers()
  },
  template: `
    <form data-ng-group="hero" novalidate>
      <div class="form-group">
        <label for="name">Name</label>
        <input id="name" name="name" type="text" class="form-control" required >
        <div class="alert alert-danger" data-ng-if="hero.name.valueMissing">
          Name is required
        </div>
      </div>
      <div class="form-group">
        <label for="power">Hero Power</label>
        <select id="power" name="power" class="form-control" pattern=".{2}">
          <option data-ng-for="let p of powers" data-ng-text="p.name" >Nothing here</option>
        </select>
        <div class="alert alert-danger" data-ng-if="hero.power.dirty && !hero.power.valid">
          Power is required
        </div>
      </div>
       <button type="submit" class="btn btn-default" data-ng-prop="'disabled', !hero.group.valid">Submit</button>\n\
    </form>
`
})

export class HeroView extends FormView {
  el: HTMLElement;
  models: ngBackbone.ModelMap;

  initialize() {
    this.models.get( "powers" ).fetch();
    this.render();
  }

  onSubmitForm( e:Event ){
    e.preventDefault();
    alert( "Form submitted" )
  }

}

ngBackbone.Book

Contributing

ngBackbone welcomes maintainers. There is plenty of work to do. No big commitment required, if all you do is review a single Pull Request, you are a maintainer.

How to set up

npm install typescript -g
npm install
typings install

How to build

npm run build

How to run tests

npm run test

Introduction