Evening on Backbone.js/Views w/ Q&A with David Heinemeier Hansson

Meetup sponsored by Manilla.com (http://manilla.com) and SFRails (http://meetup.com/SFRails/). David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) discusses the new "Basecamp Next" implementation, shows off code from their complete rewrite, and reveals their new advanced "Russian Doll" caching strategy.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Jim Jones]

@44Bigs That's actually the point he makes several times in the video. They just return javascript (e.g. render create.js.erb) in the payload and then render it clientside, just like RJS (like you said). It keeps things simple, with all of the rendering and template logic kept server side. Look at 1:12:25 in the video where he describes this.

His point is that keeping view logic server side still is the simplest/most elegant solution for a majority of the sites being developed.

[Gabe da Silveira]

I'm a rubyist but I don't look to DHH for inspiration about the right way to do client-side dev. He admits his bias up front: he wants to use the language he most enjoys. This leads to shoehorning Javascript into a Ruby paradigm such as RJS. PJAX and nesting-doll caching is a solid architecture, but it ignores the potential elegance of a well structured client-side model. Divesting yourself of the relative ugliness of Javascript is not worth the loss in overall system elegance and performance.

[olivier nguyen]

"Work on cool shit with cool people for as long as possible" :)

[William Li]

NO, what he's trying to say is "give me Ruby, and fuck everything else"

[Jim Zhou]

I like DHH, gives me a lot of inspiration. Not like someone who made a long talk and I still can't get what their point is.

[LolFauxNews]

Shut up frenchie

[Jesus Bejarano]

In resume what David was trying to say :

client-side= outside

server-side= inside

"It' does'nt matter what is on the outside , what matters is on the inside".

[Jesus Bejarano]

David is so vulgar o.o.

[Jesus Bejarano]

Is not the white t-shirt guy in the beginning of the video Jeffrey way?

[Sasha Nike]

yes

[pxln]

I was hoping for that question to come up aswell. 1) when you build your application, you automatically get an API that you can make public. 2) It seems to be a logical separation of concern, and makes scaling easier. 3) If you respond with js/html, your server code is tied to a browser. 4) You're rendering code in your views.. Do you want to worry about escaping data for javascript interpreters?.. 5) We did this where i work for 5 years, it gets messy and hard to maintain/debug.