Question

As an exercise, I intend to replace all front-facing aspects of my Rails application with Backbone.js. Part of the plan includes redesigning everything right down to the CSS.

The issue I’m struggling with is in delegating responsibility for templates and views.

Is there any benefit to implementing the new front-end entirely in Backbone, hence only using Rails as an API?

How do I strike the right balance between Rails and Backbone when it comes to handling the HTML elements of the application?

Answer 1

Since it seems that nobody is going to post an answer to this I’ll offer my two cents as just one point of view (I’ve written elsewhere about the issue of how to get rails and backbone.js to work well together: rails and backbone working together).

Most people in this situation will tend to drop the rails views altogether and migrate everything to backbone.js.

This is what I’ve done in a project that I’m working on right now.

This is the natural course of events, and particularly once you start getting used to all the complex interesting things you can do with backbone.js and structured javascript, it becomes difficult to turn back and implement standard stateless HTML pages.

As I mentioned in my other answer linked to above; however, there are costs to completely abandoning HTML views and the stateless layer. In my case, I intend to add back pure HTML pages for non-js-enabled browsers for GET requests only once the app has reached a certain level of functionality. We won’t support POST or PUT requests unless the user has javascript enabled (or unless they want to go through the JSON API).

That’s the balance I’ve struck: stateless HTML (no-JS) for accessing data, but JS required for posting/changing data. Your choice will vary depending on your use case and target user.

The other thing that I would mention is that if you have been working with rails HTML views on a project for some time, you might be unprepared for the initial overhead required to switch to backbone.js. This is not simply swapping HAML for ERB: you are migrating from a stateless front-end to a stateful one, and that is a potentially huge change (depending on the complexity of the app). I myself was a bit unprepared for the depth of that change, and had to do a lot of catching up before getting our app back on track after making the switch. And we made the switch very early, with minimal functionality already in-place.

Anyway just a few thoughts, hope they help.