New Training: Building Web Applications with Backbone.js

For more than a year, people have been asking us how they can better organize their JavaScript application code. And for more than a year, we’ve been working on an answer to this question.

At Bocoup, we’ve realized that modern client-side web applications present complexities previously only seen in server-side development. Maintaining separation between data and presentation layers is a well known server-side development practice that translates directly to building rich client-side web applications. Without the proper approach however, large applications can turn into a disorganized mess with tightly coupled data and view code. The resulting maintenance costs are high and can easily slow down development time.

Enter Backbone.js. Backbone is a lightweight library that provides a set of battle-tested patterns for thinking about how to structure apps. In addition to enforcing the kind of best practices that lead to maintainable, modular and readable code, Backbone allows the developer a great deal of freedom in how and which parts of the library are used.

Although online tutorials and videos can get you part-way there, there’s really no substitute for hands-on training, where an instructor will be available to give you personal assistance as you work on real-world projects. With that said, we’re excited to announce our latest training, Building Web Applications with Backbone.js. This 3-day workshop has been specifically designed to fill a very real need: to help JavaScript developers take their application development skills to the next level, using consistent, best-practice techniques.

Topics covered in our workshop include code organization, debugging techniques, maximizing maintainability and scalability, separating data and presentation layers with the MVC pattern, and creating RESTful APIs. In addition to the basics, our instructors will also dive into more advanced topics encompassing the latest browser technologies, such as offline storage, WebSockets and routing with the HTML5 History API.

This training has been developed in-house by our resident Backbone experts, Irene Ros and Tim Branyen. Both Irene and Tim are talented JavaScript developers, Irene is also a data visualization artist, and Tim is a contributor to the Backbone project and maintainer of multiple Node.js modules.

In addition to these ongoing workshops, we’ll also be posting some Backbone-related articles to the Bocoup blog, so be sure to stay tuned and check our Backbone training page for more information on scheduling and pricing!