Spine - Build Awesome JavaScript MVC Applications

Posted Thu, 17/11/2011 - 06:52 by ittayd
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Spine is an MVC framework to build client side web applications. It is modeled after Rails, with integration for the server side. It is also built using Coffeescript and supports writing applications in Coffeescript.

 

Another core value is that it focuses on making interactions with the server asynchronous, thus reducing the percieved load time of data.

Full story:
http://spinejs.com/docs/introduction

Comments

by orenf - 27/11/2011 - 09:56

 and to go along with this link:

http://addyosmani.com/blog/building-apps-spinejs/

by adi - 06/12/2011 - 15:18

I wonder why Alex went for MVC and not EDA...

I really believe that an async, event-driven framework suites this region better...

by orenf - 06/12/2011 - 15:57

I agree that classic MVC doesn't always fit nicely to front-end development and in particular - javascript.

However, in my opinion, the MVC concept doesn't break the EDA concept:

I think that writing MVC modules (and a massive full application) aids in these ways:

  1. encourages using EDA for throwing events and notifying a main application controller
  2. push towards a better architecture for code, thus, more readable for humans, more scaleable.

by adi - 06/12/2011 - 16:28

These concepts hardly fit. Events, by nature, don't control flow. 

MVC is based on request-respone interactions and clients perform actions (something is about to happen). On the other hand, an event is an indication about something that already happened. Also, an event processing system might block events, for example - for security reasons (the event dispatcher won't know anything about it), transform events of some type to a whole different one, split one event instance into number of different ones, and do much more.  You cannot guarantee the result of dispatching an event.

I was talking about this kind of EDA. 

by orenf - 06/12/2011 - 16:52

I couldn't agree more that javascript is an event driven language and should be constructed by EDA methodology.

I'm refering to the MVC concept as a convient method for building modules (module architecture) with sepeartion in mind - that - in order to achieve among others, good scalability.

The responsibility of each component in MVC is not clear - "View" should only render data? how?

regarding "transform events of some type to a whole different one":

a module which is built with MVC inside ,can dispatch an event of "x", which is then, arrives to a main controller, which throws other relevant events.

A good description of what my point is - can be found in this section of wiki's MVC.

I'm not sure how suitable a classic EDA to javascript - this subject can be a good brainstorming.