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JavaScript module bundling has been around for a while. RequireJS had its first commits in 2009, then Browserify made its debut, and since then several other bundlers have spawned across the Internet.
Among that group, webpack has jumped out as one of the best. If you’re not familiar with it, I hope this article will get you started with this powerful tool.
Node.js brought about a great revolution for JavaScript developers by allowing us to write code that runs directly on our machines; our skills were no longer limited to browsers alone. At first, many of us simply saw this as a way to write our application servers without needing to learn another language, but we all quickly caught on to the fact that we could also write tools for the command line that automate a lot of things in our development cycles.
npm, which is bundled with Node.js, made this even easier by giving us quick and easy access to tools that others have created, which we install on our machines to access from wherever we are in our system. JavaScript was finally a “real” programming language. But with these new capabilities came a lot of best practices that needed to be discovered, because there were many new scenarios that wouldn’t be found in the browser. In particular, I’d like to discuss a practice that has been on my mind a lot lately that I think much of the community needs to evaluate.
To help you tap the full potential of Marionette, we've prepared an entire eBook full of useful hands-on examples which is also available in the Smashing Library. — Ed.
In this series on Backbone.Marionette, we’ve already discussed Application and Module. This time, we’ll be taking a gander at how Marionette helps make views better in Backbone. Marionette extends the base View class from Backbone to give us more built-in functionality, to eliminate most of the boilerplate code and to convert all of the common code down to configuration.
I highly recommend that you go back and read the articles about Application and Module first, if you haven’t already. Some things may be mentioned in this article that refer to the previous articles, and this is part of a series about Marionette, so if you wish to learn about Marionette, you should read the whole series.
In the first part of this series, we discussed Backbone.Marionette’s Application. This time around, we’ll discuss the module system that is included in Backbone.Marionette. Modules are accessible through the Application, but modules are a very large topic and deserve an article dedicated to them.
Before we get into the details of how to use Marionette’s module system, we should make sure we all have a decent definition of a module. A module is an independent unit of code that ideally does one thing. It can be used in conjunction with other modules to create an entire system. The more independent a unit of code is, the more easily it can be exchanged or internally modified without affecting other parts of the system.
Backbone.js is quickly becoming the most popular framework for building modular client-side JavaScript applications. This is largely due to its low barrier to entry; getting started with it is super-simple.
However, unlike Ember.js, Backbone, being so minimal, also leaves a lot up to the developer to figure out. So, once you start getting into more advanced applications, it’s no longer so simple. Backbone.Marionette was created to alleviate a lot of the growing pains of Backbone development.
