Backbone.js

Asynchronous programming used to be a challenge even for seasoned professionals, leading to aptly named phenomena like Callback Hell. In this article, Toptal JavaScript Developer Demir Selmanovic explains how async functions took us out of purgatory and why you should be using them.

Backbone.js equips the developer with an array of tools that are minimal but extremely flexible. This gives developers the option to design the applications the way they want, but also introduces a number of way things can go wrong. This article outlines a few common mistakes that Backbone.js developers can make, and how they may avoid them.

React.js is a fantastic library. It is only one part of a front-end application stack, however. It doesn't have much to offer when it comes to managing data and state. Facebook, the makers of React, have offered some guidance there in the form of Flux. I'll introduce basic Flux control flow, discuss what's missing for Stores, and how to use Backbone Models and Collections to fill the gap in a "Flux-compliant" way.

As modern web applications do more and more on the client-side (the fact itself that we now refer to them as “web applications” as opposed to “web sites” is quite telling), there has been rising interest in client-side frameworks. There are a lot of players in this field but for applications with lots of functionality and many moving parts, two of them stand out in particular: Angular.js and Ember.js. Angular.js has already been introduced on this blog, so we're going to focus on Ember.js in this post, in which we'll build a simple Ember application to catalog your music collection. You'll be introduced to the framework's main building blocks and get a glimpse into its design principles.

After much thought, I decided to engineer a solution to the idea abandonment problem. I call it the ‘Init' project (or Init.js). The core of the idea is to have a single project to start them all, to let the developer or the technical founder make all of the essential decisions at once, and receive an appropriate starting template based on those decisions.