JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

So you love the way single-page apps like Gmail and Trello feel, but aren’t sure where to start.  Maybe your JavaScript code has become disorganized enough that you are convinced to try one of the numerous  JavaScript MVC libraries/frameworks on your next project but aren’t sure which one to choose.  I’m writing  a book on single-page apps so I’ve pretty much “read the internet” on the topic.  I’ll attempt to provide some not so obvious insights to help you make your decision.

The frameworks discussed are the ones with the most traction at present AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, and Knockout.  Batman, CANjs, Meteor, and Spine are also mentioned but not covered in-depth.

Each project is examined from several different perspectives including community, leadership, maturity, size, dependencies, interoperability, inspiration, philosophy, and features.

Design patterns are the bread and butter of application development. They encapsulate and outline the concerns of the application and the environment of the in which it exists. Between the browser and the server these concerns can vary widely:
* Is the view ephemeral (e.g. on the server) or long-lived (e.g. in the browser)?
* Is the view reusable across different use-cases or scenarios?
* Should the view be annotated with application-specific tags or markup?
* Where should the bulk of the business logic reside? (in the model? in the controller?)
* How is the application state persisted or accessed?
Lets explore some of the existing patterns and how they answer these questions:
* Model-View-Controller
* Model2
* Model-View Presenter and Model-View-ViewModel
* Modern Javascript Implementations
* Real-time Implications
* tl;dr? Introducing Resource-View-Presenter
* Conclusion

Almost every developer must have came across the word MVC in his life. Many of them must be fortune to work with MVC technology on platforms like Java, .Net, PHP etc. Below is my understanding of MVC and other related jargon..

Backbone.js is a lightweight framework that let us create single page applications in a structured manner. It is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. It is best suited for creating single page applications using a RESTful service for persisting the data. 

Marionette.js is a composite application library built on top of backbone.js and it allows us to build large scale javascript single page application. Backbone.js does not enforce the use of strict MVC pattern but backbone marionette enforces the use of strict MVC pattern. marionette also provides us View classes that we can create and extend simple view, collection views and composite views. It also gives us the possibility of creating Controller classes and eventing mechanism across the application.

One of the many ways in which EmberJS, AngularJS, and BackboneJS differ is in how they treat their models. AngularJS uses dirty checking on Plain Old Javascript Objects (POJSO); whereas EmberJS and BackboneJS both use accessors (getters and setters) on wrapped objects.

We will be exploring the ways in which these two approaches differ, and the implications these differences have when it comes to choosing which Javascript framework we we should write our single page apps in.

Most Javascript frameworks for front end user interfaces used to build single page applications (SPAs) use MV* architectures, and a feature that most of them have in common is the ability for the View to update the Model, and for the Model to update the View.

For this to happen, there needs to be to be a means to “listen” for these changes, and then trigger some code to respond to that change. One call this “Two-way Data Binding”.