An Application Architecture Using Backbone.js

Introduction

Chaplin is an architecture for JavaScript applications using the Backbone.js library.

Support and Help
Commercial Support and Training
Key Features
Motivation
Dependencies
Download Chaplin
Building Chaplin
Running the Tests
Boilerplates
Examples
Documentation
The Cast
The Producers

Documentation and Support

We’re working on a comprehensive documentation and class reference on Github.
For general support and discussion, there’s a Google Group, a forum on ost.io and an IRC channel #chaplinjs on Freenode.
If you’d like to report a bug or propose a feature, please use the Github issues. The issue tracker can also be used for general questions and task management.
Follow Chaplin.js on Twitter to get updates on new versions, major changes and the ongoing development.

Commercial Support and Training

9elements, one of the creators of Chaplin, is offering commercial support and training for Chaplin and Backbone-based JavaScript applications. 9elements is a software and design agency located in Berlin and Bochum, Germany. Send us a mail for more information: contact@9elements.com.

Key Features

CoffeeScript class hierarchies as well as object composition
Module encapsulation and lazy-loading using AMD modules
Cross-module communication using the Mediator and Publish/Subscribe patterns
Introducing Controllers that represent UI screens
Rails-style declarative routes that map URLs to controller actions
A route dispatcher and a top-level view manager
Extended model, view and collection classes to avoid repetition and enforce conventions
Strict memory management and object disposal
A collection view for easy and intelligent list rendering

Motivation

While developing several web applications using Backbone.js, we felt the need for conventions on how to structure such applications. Backbone is an easy starting point, but provides only basic, low-level patterns. Especially, Backbone provides little to structure an actual application. For example, the famous “Todo list” is not an application in the strict sense nor does it teach best practices how to structure Backbone code.

Backbone doesn’t intend to be an all-round framework so it’s not appropriate to blame Backbone for these deliberate limitations. Nonetheless, most Backbone use cases need a sophisticated application architecture.

This is where Chaplin enters the stage. Chaplin is derived from the codebase of moviepilot.com, a real-world single-page application. It draws attention to the top-level architecture: everything above simple routing, individual models, views and their binding.

Dependencies

Chaplin depends on the following libraries:

Backbone (> 0.9.2)
Underscore (> 1.4.2) or lodash (> 0.8.2)
jQuery (> 1.8.2) or Zepto (> 1.0rc1)

If you’ll be using AMD version, you will also need an AMD module loader like RequireJS, Almond or curl to load Chaplin and lazy-module application modules

Download Chaplin

Using bower

Install the Node package for the Bower package manager.
```
sudo npm install -g bower
```
Install chaplin via bower.
```
bower install chaplin
```
Specific versions may be requested as follows:
```
bower install chaplin#0.6.0
```
This will also download the required version of backbone but will not download the required DOM manipulation or utility libraries. These can be installed separately via bower install underscore, bower install jquery, bower install lodash, etc.

Manually

Download the latest release on chaplinjs.org. See below on how to compile from source manually.

Building Chaplin

The Chaplin source files are originally written in the CoffeeScript meta-language. However, the Chaplin library file is a compiled JavaScript file which defines the chaplin module.

Our build script compiles the CoffeeScripts and bundles them into one file. To run the script, follow these steps:

Download and install Node.js.
Open a shell (aka terminal aka command prompt) and type in the commands in the following steps.
Install the Node packages for CoffeeScript and UglifierJS globally.
```
sudo npm install -g coffee-script
sudo npm install -g uglify-js
```
On Windows, you can omit the sudo command at the beginning.
Install the Node package ShellJS normally.
```
npm install shelljs
```
Change into the Chaplin root directory.
Start the build.
```
cake build
```

This creates two directories:

./build/amd/ with a build using the AMD module style
./build/commonjs/ with a build using the CommonJS module style

These directories contain four files each:

chaplin-VERSION.coffee – The Chaplin library as a CoffeeScript file.
chaplin-VERSION.js – The library as a compiled JavaScript file.
chaplin-VERSION-min.js – Minified. For production use you should pick this.
chaplin-VERSION-min.js.gz – Minified and GZip-compressed.

Running the Tests

Chaplin aims to be fully unit-tested. At the moment most of the modules are covered by Mocha tests.

How to run the tests:

Download and install Node.js.
Open a shell (aka terminal aka command prompt) and type in the commands in the following steps.
Install the Node package for CoffeeScript globally.
```
sudo npm install -g coffee-script
```
On Windows, you can omit the sudo command at the beginning.
Install the Node package for the Bower package manager.
```
sudo npm install -g bower
```
Change into the Chaplin root directory.
Use Bower to download all third-party libraries the tests are using (Backbone, jQuery, Mocha etc.).
```
bower install
```
Compile the CoffeeScripts to JavaScripts.
```
cake test
```
Finally, open the test runner test/index.html in a browser.

Boilerplates

Chaplin needs a simple skeleton to start up and configure the core modules. We provides several boilerplates to make the start easier.

Chaplin Boilerplate is a “Hello world” example project using Chaplin. If you’re not a CoffeeScript user, there’s also a plain JavaScript boilerplate.

For Ruby on Rails users, we’ve compiled a Boilerplate Rails Application with Backbone, Chaplin and Require.js.

Brunch with Chaplin

github.com/paulmillr/brunch-with-chaplin

Brunch with Chaplin is a skeleton application, where brunch is used for assembling files & assets. It has ready-to-use classes for session management, html5boilerplate and stylus / handlebars.js as app languages.

Examples

Several example applications are available today:

Facebook Like Browser

github.com/chaplinjs/facebook-example

This example uses Facebook client-side authentication to display the user’s Likes.

Ost.io

github.com/paulmillr/ostio is a forum for GitHub projects and a modern replacement for mailing lists.

Ost.io serves as a good example of a fast service-based application, using Ruby on Rails as a lightweight backend (which is open-sourced too) that only handles authentication / server-side logic & talks JSON to clients. In this way, frontend is completely decoupled from the backend which gives the ability to work on both projects in parallel and increases scalability, speed & mainbtability quite a lot.

Tweet your Brunch

github.com/brunch/twitter is a simple twitter client. It uses Twitter client-side authentication to display user’s feed and to create new tweets.

Documentation

All docs are located in docs/ subdirectory.

deanchen / chaplin