Introducing Marionette-Require-Boilerplate for Your Single Page Application

Brett Jones Development Technologies, HTML5, JavaScript 1 Comment

Attention: The following article was published over 11 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.

Marionette-Require-Boilerplate (MRB) is a simple boilerplate I created to help get Single Page Applications off the ground with a small starter project. It incorporates a number of great tools and best practices to save time in the early stages of a project.

MRB integrates such cutting edge libraries as BackboneMarionetteRequireGruntJasmineBootstrap, and jQuery Mobile, among others. These libraries work together to help you start your project off with a rock-solid foundation, with a powerful module system, composite architecture, simple build process, and unit tests. Marionette-Require-Boilerplate is part of the BoilerplateMVC suite, which includes standouts like Backbone-Require-Boilerplate, the inspiration and basis for MRB. Stay tuned for more from the BoilerplateMVC team!

The GitHub repo has more extensive documentation, but in this post I’d like to introduce some of the underlying technologies and explain what makes MRB a great place to start for your SPA.

Marionette

Marionette is a framework that sits on top of Backbone and provides a composite architecture and a set of tools to help you solve some of the most common problems in Backbone applications, including nested views and layouts, memory management and cleanup of zombie views, and event-driven architecture. Backbone is a fantastic library and provides many useful pieces, but its great strength — lightweight flexibility — is also its great weakness. It is not a framework and leaves you to figure out some basic functions, like how best to create and remove views, or how to nest views within each other.

If you are not confident in your ability to competently architect a Backbone JS application, or you’re just looking to save time, then Marionette is the tool for you. Read more about what it has to offer in the Marionette chapter of Addy Osmani’s Backbone Fundamentals e-book.

Require

RequireJS is the most popular implementation of the Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) spec. It provides a powerful, flexible and consistent way to organize your application into separate modules with clearly defined dependencies. It allows you to load these modules as separate files asynchronously in your code, or use the r.js optimizer to load all of your modules in a single, minified JS file for production builds.

Note: Marionette has a concept of Module that is very different from the RequireJS “Module” concept. Do not confuse the two. In Require, a module is simply a unit of code that is run once and returns a function or object of some kind for use in other modules. In Marionette, a Module is essentially a section of your application that can be started or stopped, serving as a coarse grain method of organizing your code. It would be possible to define a Marionette Module in a Require Module if you like, but your head might explode.

Bootstrap and jQuery Mobile

Twitter Bootstrap is a leading front-end UI framework for building rich web applications. It includes a large set of CSS classes and jQuery widgets that you can add to your markup to transform it into beautiful, sleek and customizable UI elements. It is an ubiquitous framework — popular because it helps developers who lack certain design skills to easily crank out clean, elegant UIs with minimal effort and non-invasive code and CSS. jQuery Mobile is a leading UI framework for mobile applications that builds on jQuery UI and brings a number of mobile-friendly widgets and controls to the table.

Mobile vs Desktop

MRB uses a scheme (borrowed from Backbone-Require-Boilerplate) that detects the user’s browser and loads either Bootstrap or jQuery Mobile accordingly. It also loads either the Desktop Marionette Controller or the Mobile Marionette Controller. In Marionette, a Controllerhandles a Router’s routes, and is used to instantiate Models and Views and show them in appropriate Regions or Layouts.

In MRB, the Mobile/Desktop Controllers load Views which work with either jQuery Mobile or Bootstrap (for instance, MobileController loads a MobileHeaderView, while DesktopControllerloads a DesktopHeaderView). This is our strategy for differentiating behavior and UI elements for mobile or desktop. This is just my strategy, and it may or may not work well for you, so take it or leave it. If you don’t want to worry about the mobile/desktop dichotomy up front, you might consider checking out Marionette-Require-Boilerplate-Lite, which eschews this division and skips jQuery Mobile in favor of a purely Bootstrap approach. Whichever you prefer.

Grunt

Grunt is a first-rate build tool built on Node which allows you to run any number of compatible plugins. In MRB, we use Grunt to execute our RequireJS Optimization, minify our JavaScript and CSS, and run JSHint to detect bugs in our code.

Jasmine

MRB uses Jasmine to execute and manage unit tests. Jasmine’s syntax is very readable and makes it an attractive choice for unit tests.

Handlebars

Handlebars is our templating engine of choice. It offers a clean, friendly syntax that discourages excessive logic in your views, and is a popular choice these days over EJS-style templating options like Underscore’s _.template(). In MRB, we use the require-handlebars-plugin to automatically load our templates as AMD modules, pre-compiled (read: big performance boost) and with custom helper methods and i18n support.

Node HTTP Server

MRB runs a simple Node HttpServer on port 8001. This is not necessary, but since Grunt and the RequireJS optimizer both run on Node, it is a reasonable assumption that the user will have it installed. If you don’t want to run MRB on Node, you can just as easily point a simple Apache web server at the public/ directory in the project. A web server is required; using the plain file system won’t work because of RequireJS’s dynamic loading of resources.

Best Tools + Best Practices

With Marionette-Require-Boilerplate, I have attempted to bring together a collection of great tools and best practices to help web applications get started quickly and with a firm footing. I hope you find it as useful as I have. I’d love to hear your feedback, so follow me on GitHub or hit me up on Twitter!

— Brett Jones, [email protected]

Note: This post was originally published on Keyhole consultant Brett Jones’s personal blog site on May 29, 2013.

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