#backbonejs — Public Fediverse posts

@[email protected] I still have a couple of SPA’s to manage that are about 9-10 years old. Written in #CoffeeScript 1 (not too bad) and #BackboneJS with a #Perl #Mojolicious backend.

Getting to run the JS dev stuff and keeping it up to date, or rather working with a newer Node version is challenging. Looking back it being a SPA doesn’t do much for 85% of these apps. I should’ve used some #jQuery instead for the interactive parts. That way I could’ve moved to #htmx without any issue.

I set out to answer an old question on Stack Overflow, but ended up writing a long tutorial on #BackboneJS, @jquery, #UnderscoreJS and #sprintf, including some advanced techniques. Comments, questions and suggestions welcome.
#JavaScript
https://stackoverflow.com/a/76237929/1166087

Like I said, this stack of #perl, #Mojolicious, #MySQL, #CoffeeScript, #BackboneJS and #Bootstrap has served me well this past decade. I've got several business critical webapps running in it.

The backend stays. The frontend gets replaced by mostly plain #HTML with #htmx and #TailwindCSS. This makes development a lot faster: less context switching as most of it is done inside HTML templates. Added but very nice bonus: less complicated and error prone build pipeline!

END

Having been in webdevelopment for about 20 years now (yikes!) using stuff like #MooTools, #jQuery, #Knockoutjs, #Backbonejs, #Marionettejs and #React sort of fixed the issue of making webapps interactive/reactive. It always felt cumbersome though as it required a lot of different stuff to make it possible. And now we suddenly had to manage state, validation etc. on the client side as well. More work.

But, I think I found the solution to this problem. One that reminds me of the good old days...

Trying to add some new stuff this week made me realise: I don't enjoy working on this. It has nothing to do with the backend though. I'll always love #perl and #Mojolicious. Both very stable and this past decade I had very little issues with upgrading if any at all.

The part of the stack that needs replacement is the frontend. It's one big #SPA (single page application) which means a bunch of HTTP JSON endpoints and #Backbonejs + #CoffeeScript + #Mustache taking care of the client side.

The webapp is written in #perl with #Mojolicious for the backend powered by #MySQL.

For frontend I went with #Backbonejs and #CoffeeScript. The state and support of modern #JavaScript features was limited back then, dare I say cumbersome. I also enjoyed CoffeeScript, even though I don't like #Python ;-). To make it look half decent I went with #Bootstrap as a CSS framework, but hardly any customisations.

For development I used #Vagrant with #VirtualBox, but since 4-5 years I moved to #Docker.