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On what grounds do you say that? Not necessarily disagreeing, I've never used YUI3, but I'd love to hear more about it. I've recently been dabbling in Backbon

• jashkenas 15y ago
  How would you like the documentation to be improved over the resources that currently exist at Backbonejs.org?
  • epidemian 15y ago
    I'm also curious. I've found the Backbone and Underscore documentation to be pretty good actually. And, in case I'm wondering what a function does _exactly_, the annotated source code (http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html) is more than enough usually.
  • bmelton 15y ago
    Perhaps "lack of documentation" isn't the best synopsis. "lack of documentation for people who don't know what they're doing" is probably more accurate. I've found the documentation to be a great reference, but invariably, due to lack of examples, if I'm trying to implement something I haven't used before, I have to scour the internet for other information before I can generally make sense of the official backbone docs. The best documentation I've found thus far has been other people's projects in Github. While trying not to cargo-cult copy/paste, seeing somebody else implement a feature similar to what I'm trying to do has been the best for me.
  • bct 15y ago
    "Lack of guidance" is the way I'd describe it. The documentation is great, but it didn't help to steer me away from making architectural decisions that don't work well with Backbone when I was doing my first experiments.
    • jashkenas 15y ago
      To follow up -- what sort of architectural decisions were those?
      • bct 15y ago
        I'll try to think of examples and come back to it tomorrow. For now: One thing that I'm still not clear on is when to wrap .get/.set. Should I always write my own getters/setters and only use .get/.set internally? Right now I'm only wrapping them when the attributes need special processing, which leads to an inconsistent-feeling API.
        • jashkenas 15y ago
          I'd lean towards never, unless you have a case with really special semantics. For run-of-the-mill attribute massaging, I'd just define a new method on the model specifically for that purpose. eg. book.loadFromAmazon(amazonJSON)
          • bct 15y ago
            Hmmm, interesting. Here's a concrete example: I've got an 'Organization' model and a 'Person' model. I want to use them interchangeably in some templates, so I need to be able to get their names in a consistent way. An Organization just has a 'name', but a Person has a 'first_name' and a 'last_name'. I've been using a 'displayName' method to encapsulate the difference; would it make more sense to do something like: var Person = Backbone.Model.extend({ initialize: function() { var name = this.get('first_name') + ' ' + this.get('last_name'); this.set({ name: name }, { silent: true }); } });
            • crescentfresh 15y ago
              .displayName() seems like a perfect encapsulation IMO.
    • bmelton 15y ago
  • 2mur 15y ago
    I think that the documentation for backbone and underscore is excellent. And the single page, annotated source code is probably even more helpful. The thing that I wish the project had was some official opinionated best practices guidelines. How to structure a growing app, build/minify workflow, pitfalls, etc. (Note: this wish may be due to my utter noobishness and I'm mostly monitoring the mailing list and reading all the questions to learn) Other than that, I wish AMD was going to be supported in core, but tbranyen's requirejs use (shim) plugin is going pretty well.
• knotty66 15y ago
  The Spine documentation is fantastic. http://spinejs.com/ http://spinejs.com/