Data Binding in "single-page-multiple-views" web apps - javascript

There are a number of popular frameworks around to provide data binding between objects and views. This is a great idea; when the data changes, the view is updated automagically and vice versa. However, in mobile web apps, wrapped with Phonegap or equivalent, the app usually consists of one single html page holding multiple "views" (usually divs used as containers). Only one view is displayed at a time, which means that only data bindings belonging to the current view need to be calculated and updated. If all views are updated all the time, it means a lot of unnecessary calculation and updates of invisible DOM elements. This should be avoided, since performance often is a problem in these apps.
What is the case with current JS frameworks? How do they handle this? I am especially interested in Angular.JS, but if there are other frameworks that handle the issue better, I am very curious to know.

You can try knockout.js. Knockout allows you to data-bind subset of elements on your page

Related

What problems does javascript frameworks like React/Angular solve?

I am new to React js and I have been trying to understand what real problem does js frameworks like React,Angular solve and why one need to learn them.
Of Course when i see advantages of framework everybody talk about "Shadow/Virtual DOM, Router, Reusable Components etc" , but then I stumbled upon below links which talk something different
https://medium.com/dailyjs/the-deepest-reason-why-modern-javascript-frameworks-exist-933b86ebc445
https://www.codementor.io/binarymuse/react-components-from-a-jquery-programmer-background-du107k2lz
but they were not clear to me
So i am meaning to understand how difficult it was to maintain js/jquery code before these framework came by.
Everybody is just asking to learn these frameworks because they are popular but none of them clearly explains why they are popular and what problem they solve and how they make our life easier when it comes to creating web-app from scratch.
Others have already mentioned the advantages and what these frameworks resolve.
I wanted to add what problems they can create:
I have seen many people that use a framework see it as a hammer and every website as a nail. In other words they either don't or can't figure out that in many cases a framework is not needed. I have seen web pages that are nearly 90% static data still download an entire framework just to provide drop menus or something else trivial.
Frameworks force you into a lifecycle and development style that, in some ways, make some things easier and other things much, much more complicated. AngularJS had a nasty digest cycle that often led to complications. Redux forces you to write much more code than needed just to handle state that on many pages is not needed. Vue, React, Angular all force you to either use their data creation functions, their way of rendering or their way of handling inter element communication. And none of these are faster than vanillaJS. Even virtual DOM has its issues.
The size of a framework is often much more than needed. I have several small libraries that do the majority of the work that a framework does but my code is in the sub 5K range if I load it all.
Some people that learn a framework first can not figure out how to write in raw JavaScript. They also tend to learn sloppy ways to write code. No, not everyone, but a large number people that did not start with vanilla JS write code that tends to be much larger and sloppier than needed.
It is best to avoid JavaScript except where really needed. Often I can use raw HTML and CSS to do everything I need to do. I find that it is rare that I need to use much JavaScript even in projects that exceed several thousand files. It is faster to allow the browser to process HTML and CSS, which all processes at compiled speeds and only use JavaScript for things you can not do in HTML and CSS.
You don't "need" to learn them, but many people and companies use them. The main advantage is being able to have your entire site on a single webpage, where you just modify the data and it handles changing the elements on the page for you. For instance, you can just think about "put the user's name here, and when they click the button, add another list field there", but you no longer have to think about "get this DOM element, set its innerHTML to the user's name, and when they click the button, create a new DOM element for input, another one for the label, get the container element, append the new children". It also allows you to more easily bind data to DOM elements, so you can just say "this field is for the variable 'numberOfItems'" instead of worrying about grabbing the DOM element and its value and storing it into numberOfItems when you need it; with React/Angular/etc. that variable will always be up to date with the user's input without you needing to update it.
TL;DR: The frameworks are not necessary, but they help automatically handle a lot of common, tedious DOM manipulation for you in a way more optimized than you'd likely end up implementing yourself, with less code for you, and all on a single page instead of having to reload the page every time you want to display new data or a new layout.
What is React JS?
ReactJS is an open-source JavaScript library that is used for building user interfaces specifically for single-page applications. It’s used for handling the view layer for web and mobile apps. React also allows us to create reusable UI components.
React allows developers to create large web applications that can change data, without reloading the page. The main purpose of React is to be fast, scalable, and simple. It works only on user interfaces in the application. This corresponds to view in the MVC template. It can be used with a combination of other JavaScript libraries or frameworks, such as Angular JS in MVC.
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/what-and-why-reactjs/
This is a wide discussion about frameworks in general. Is easy to say React, Angular and so on makes easier to manipulate DOM elements and reuse components, but to apply frameworks usually are about if solve your problem.
in javascript we have load the webpage by using location.href but by using angular/react we the page updates automatically.

ExtJS 4 Web Application State Management

I am creating an ExtJS 4 single-page web application, and coming across some issues deciding on the MVC-favoured way of defining and maintaining my application state. I am aware of the global nature of ExtJS 4's stores, and I like the idea of them, but the practicalities of them are called into question on a couple of points.
For example, I have models that could possibly need to scale into the thousands at some point, and the idea of loading all of these into the memory of the client's browser does not strike me as the best of ideas. I would have great performance concerns with trying to do this.
Additionally, my application will have windows, multiples of which that may be viewed at the same time, in addition to multiple grids on the same tab in a tab panel. These views are supposed to show a subset of the models based on their properties. If these views are tied to the same global store and its models, they will be affected by operations such as filter and will effectively be restricted to showing the same set of models, which is not what I am trying to achieve.
So my actual question is how do I go about handling this situation? I have read a similar concern on StackOverflow that called for the views to hold their own instance of the store rather than using the global instance, but I am not sure this fits the MVC pattern correctly. My current thinking is along the lines of having a controller that manages the state and holds the various instances of the stores so they are not directly tied to the views and yet they can still be accessed on event calls and by other controllers. Is this a good solution or am I missing something?
Well, there's a lot going on in your question. First of all, I think you are over-thinking stores a bit. Ultimately, a store is just a cache of model instances. So you can create as many instances of them that you want, depending on the requirements of your application. If you want to try to use a single store to manage the entire data set, you can certainly do that, but you'll have to be VERY aware and vigilant in keeping track of filters/sorters/etc that you apply throughout the flow of your application.
Re: the scale of your application's data, I would strongly suggest not trying to load all your model instances in at the same time (depending on the size and complexity of data, of course). Unless you actually need all possible instances available in the application at all times, I would adopt an approach that loads only what you need, depending on the scenario. If you need access to thousands of records, you can always apply remote filters to still deal with the whole data set on the server side, but only actually interact with a subset of the data on the client side.
Ultimately, I wouldn't worry so much about whether or not a particular approach "fits" the MVC pattern (which is itself a very particular flavor in Ext JS, a flavor not desired by everyone...). Yes, you want to create an approach that is extensible and manageable; however, I would argue that the requirements of your application should drive how you utilize the MVC conventions that Ext JS 4 provides, rather than allowing the MVC conventions to determine your business requirements.

Backbone.js and jQuery

It is said that Backbone handles all the higher level abstractions, while jQuery or similar libraries work with the DOM, normalize events and so on..
Could someone please help me understand this statement with any simple practical example.
Also one important feature of MVC framework like Backbone, Knockout is that it keeps the model (data) and the view in sync. But this seems to be specific at a page-level and not across the entire application. So can we have the model/data and the view synced across multiple pages..(kind of global)
Your opening sentence was actually a very good statement of the differences between Backbone.js and jQuery, so let's unpack it a bit.
For one thing, the two libraries are not at all in competition--they are complimentary.
As an example, here are some things I would do with jQuery:
Animated slideshows
Form control enhancements, like an iOS-style number "spinner"
Toggling visibility of elements based on a class name
And some things that I might do in Backbone.js:
Create a photo album, where the user clicks on a thumbnail and can view a larger version of the photo, along with some data like the camera that was used, the location and the photographer's name
Build a master/details type of page that presents a grid of data and allows the user to click on individual elements and update them in a form.
jQuery excels at the micro level--selecting page elements, smoothing out the differences in how browsers handle events.
Backbone.js is more big-picture. It helps you manage data and application logic. In the photo album example above, Backbone provides several useful structures: you'd have something to contain all of the data related to photos (a model), a list of all the photos in the album (a collection), and somewhere to put logic that determines what happens when a user clicks on a thumbnail (the view). Those are the main pieces in a Backbone control or application.
Backbone.js benefits from jQuery, though, or something like it, to help render the results of your application's data and logic into the DOM. It's common, for example, to use jQuery to select the element on the page that will serve as the container for your Backbone app. It's also common to use jQuery's $(function () {}); to fire up the pieces of your Backbone control. You'd probably display form field validation error messages with jQuery as well.
You can certainly build big, complex user interfaces in jQuery. We have a few in the app I maintain at work. But they are difficult to work with because jQuery isn't designed to provide structure to an application. In particular, jQuery's API, which is based around selecting groups of items and then passing callback functions that manipulate those items, isn't a good pattern to use in a large, complex control or app. You end up with a lot of nested functions and it's very hard to see what's going on.
I'm currently reworking one of those controls in Backbone.js. As a final example, here's a quick summary of how my thought process differs when working on the same control in both different libraries.
In jQuery, I'm worried about:
Am I using the right selector to grab the group of li elements I want?
Do I need to repopulate that list of values when this Ajax call completes?
How can I put these array values back into the input elements on the page?
In Backbone, I'm more focused on:
What is the correct logic to validate this set of properties on my model item?
When the user clicks the Add button, should I add a new item to the collection immediately, or should I wait until they've filled in all the data and it's "valid"?
How should an item in my collection respond when the item immediately before or after it is deleted?
jQuery handles the nitty-gritty details, and Backbone is more high-level.
In closing, notice I've been using the words "control" and "app" when discussing Backbone.js examples. It's not true that Backbone.js is just for single page apps. It is true, though, that Backbone.js is good for building complex applications that manipulate data and handle a lot of logic. It would be silly to use it for small-scale UI elements--the extra structure it imposes isn't needed.
Update: On the issue of multiple pages, yes, Backbone does provide a powerful mechanism for persisting your data. Each model has a save method that will execute an AJAX call to store the changes on the server. So as long as you save your data as you go, you can have a multi-page app. It's a very flexible model, and it's how we'll probably end up using Backbone at work. While I would love to build a single-page app, we have 10 years of work in our existing multi-page application. We're looking to rebuild some of our more intense UI components in Backbone, then sync the changes to the server before the user moves to a different page.
Backbone / Knockout is typically used for single page applications. So while jQuery is a toolbox that can be used with any webpage, Backbone is meant for a specific type of application and helps you organize your code for it. At least in my experience one of the biggest challenges in building a single page app is keeping the code clean and modular, and backbone helps a great deal with this.
The characteristics of a typical backbone app are:
Essentially static html page, with nothing generated on the server
Server acts as a json REST api, which provides the content for the app
The dom elements to display the data are created with javascript in backbone views, using jQuery and various templating libraries to help
Communication with the server as well as between different parts of the app is done through the backbone models
Regarding your question about keeping the data synced across multiple pages, my instinctive answer is that you don't need multiple pages: the user may perceive that the page is changing, the address in the url bar changes thanks to pushState functionality, but technically the entire app is one page.
The biggest advantages of this kind of approach are a smooth user experience (no reloading pages), good caching support as everything except the json data is static content, for mobile targets the possibility to turn the web app into a mobile app with phoneGap (because everything except json is static).
I have never heard of people using backbone.js across multiple pages. It's almost always some kind of single page app.
The single page may have many different models, views, and states and can result in a full blown, powerful app.
If you already have server-side template/view rendering in java then backbone.js is NOT for you. To get the most out of backbone.js you must move or duplicate some of that code in the front end javascript.
If you don't want to do a single page app (this just means an app without page refreshes or changes, but the url can still change and can look like multi-pages to the user) then you can keep all of your MVC on the server and you have no need for backbone.
Edit:
What backbone does is move some of the MVC stuff normally handled on the server and move them to the client. For many people this means forgetting about the server and just writing your app as a single page javascript app. The server becomes just a source of JSON/REST data. If you're not prepared to do that, then backbone.js is not that useful.
Backbone is a MV* framework while jQuery is a DOM toolkit.
The main features of an MV* application are routing, data binding, templates/views, models, and data access.
Backbone could dependant on jQuery partially.
jQuery is a solid API for querying the DOM with extensive browser support and a vibrant community. It comes with event handling, deferred objects, and animations.
Simple event binding using jQuery
// When any <p> tag is clicked, we expect to see '<p> was clicked' in the console.
$( "p" ).on( "click", function() {
console.log( "<p> was clicked" );
});

javascript frameworks: What are UI bindings and composed views?

I'm reading this:
http://codebrief.com/2012/01/the-top-10-javascript-mvc-frameworks-reviewed/
I'm using backbone.js. I love it, though it requires too much boilerplate. Anyway.
The author of the post seems to put great importance on UI-bindings and composed view.
I think I know the basic advantage of ui bindings, you can change small parts of the view as the model changes without re-rendering the entire view. I don't necessarily see the point though. If your view is huge maybe you should make smaller views? I've seen knockoutjs's code and it's littered with ugly data-bind stuff. How does emberjs handle it? Is there an example?
I have no idea what he means by composed views, could someone elucidate?
Composed Views - Like all software developers, I enjoy creating modular reusable code. For this reason, when programming UI, I would
like to be able to compose views (preferably at the template layer).
This should also entail the potential for a rich view component
hierarchy. An example of this would be a reusable pagination widget.
Is there an example?
Thanks
Edit:
Would this help make something like composed Views?
https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone.layoutmanager
Composed views are used to divide the view into small blocks which can be reused or adapted to different scenarios.
For example, in a form where you are editing a user, you could create a view for the address field and just call it from the main page/template. The author mentions pagination as an example too, in this case you could create a model that knows how to handle retrieving data as you switch between pages and just apply it to a table in your page.
Regarding the "ugly" data-binding code, backbone needs to know how to attach itself to the existing markup and how to modify it when an event occurs.
Maybe this example will help:
http://coenraets.org/blog/2011/12/backbone-js-wine-cellar-tutorial-part-1-getting-started/
Traditional web pages are monolithic. User calls a page and server constructs the page and browser renders it. Here author is referring to breaking down that kind of code in to a set of views. So your page is made up of multiple parts. And each part gets rendered and updated independently. Or one model change can trigger a series of updates on some or all parts.
Basically this allows you to create 'desktop' kind of applications on web. And you don't have to resort to iframe hacks to do this.
Gmail and Google Reader are good examples of web applications built with composed views.
I created LayoutManager for Backbone.js because I too wanted to composite views.
http://tbranyen.github.com/backbone.layoutmanager/
Let me know if you find this approach helpful.
It sounds to me like the author is talking about server-side code here. Building a system of reusable page templates, that generate pages from a common set of widgets, html snippets, etc...
Apache's Tiles is one way of doing this.

Is Backbone.js only for single page applications?

I'm searching for a simple architecture for my UI that will have some basic javascript functions in like: select all checkbox's, image crop, some pop-ups and some other plugins.
I found this article: Organizing Your Backbone.js Application With Modules
My application is not a SPA (Single Page Application). I want to know if Backbone.js with jQuery will help me even if my application is not a SPA.
The strength of Backbone is really in its ability to manage many models (even complex ones) and keep the rendered page in sync with their current values. It provides an interface to getter/setter functions so that the changing of a model value (there are many different flavors of "change") will call render on the corresponding view and the page will correctly reflect the underlying models. Furthermore, it provides interfaces to saving, paging, and routing actions on models.
I have used Backbone extensively for both SPA's (where it shines) as well as more traditional, multiple page applications. It has no special support for UI and DOM manipulation, but combined with jQuery/Prototype/Zepto it manages their rendering/manipulation.
Basically, backbone works best to untangle elaborate chains of rendering logic and model updating. If you feel that your application has a lot of view elements that need to stay in sync with models that the client will be updating on the page, Backbone is a wonderful solution. If you just need to select and manipulate DOM elements, it's overkill. jQuery alone can handle that.
Backbone is really not about the things you mentioned, but I wouldn't say it is strictly for single-age apps (SPA) either. I'd say it is for any case where you've got quite complicated pages and it would benefit you to break them up into multiple pieces (for example, several views that all pull data from one model).
However, I would say the strength of Backbone.js is in the SPA realm.
You could probably find some jQuery pieces that answer some of your needs if you're not already using jQuery as part of your app. However, jQuery is all about the parts you mentioned (easy DOM manipulation, popups if you use jQuery UI, etc.) and not about structure or organization.
I believe that the principal idea of backbone, is organize you JS code in complex app using the MVC concept.
This way your app becomes easier to mantain and add new features, It get easy to use frameworks tests like jasmine.
Backbone also make possible (and very good) work based on SPA approach, using ajax request to server. It is completely based on Restful concept, to get a code using backbone, is important to understand what is Restful.
Basically Backbone have a Router (that can work like a controller. but is not a controller).
Model that is where you can manage all the data logic of your application.
Collection that is like a list of models.
View that is where you will react accordingly the model changes.
There are other things, but basically, is this.
But as I said before, you can use it without have a SPA.
The most important thing to have in mind is that the concept of MVC must be followed when using backbone. If you don't do that, it doesn't make sense use backbone.

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