We’ve worked with our clients to execute a couple of Phonegap apps lately and in doing so used Backbone and Marionette to structure the apps. For some background, Phonegap, now Apache Cordova, is a project that allows developers to build native iOS, Android, and WP apps using HTML, CSS, and of course Javascript. As a developer, you write some HTML and Javascript, pass it to Phonegap, and Phonegap returns a native app that displays your code inside a WebView without any surrounding chrome. On top of this, Phonegap provides a set of Javascript APIs that allow you to leverage some of the device’s native functions, like the accelerometer or camera.
Writing apps with HTML/JS is great, but it presents some issues particularly that triggering a full page reload for navigation appears “non-native” on mobile. On technique to combat this issue is developing single page Javascript apps. In a single page app, the entire page is never reloaded, instead portions of the DOM are dynamically re-rendered using Javascript. Because of the complexity of managing this process with straight Javascript, several libraries, including Backbone, have been developed to simplify this process. Marionette is a companion library to Backbone which provides a set of features to make managing complex applications easier. So, what were the pros and cons of using Backbone with Marionette to build a Phonegap app?
The Good
Structure: Using a library like Backbone guides you to structuring your code in loosely a MVC design pattern. Coupled with a templating framework, this ends up producing code that’s much easier to follow and maintain. Before Phonegap, I’d already started using Backbone in traditional Symfony2 projects just to get the benefit of better structured code.
It’s familiar: This is a personal preference, but compared to declarative frameworks like AngularJS, Backbone/Marionette apps “look” like regular HTML/JS. Primarily because of the regular HTML templates and use of jQuery, the learning curve for Backbone isn’t very steep. A team member without Backbone experience can quickly grok how things work and make changes quickly.
The Not So Good
“There’s more than one way to do it”: Although flexibility is good, having a generally “well recommended” way usually helps decrease confusion and frustration. With Backbone/Marionette, there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on how to do “standard” things like message passing or even structuring the app as a whole. There’s dozens of StackOverflow answers debating the “best” way to approach things, often with outright conflicting viewpoints. In contrast, Symfony2 and Rails typically have “best practices” for approaching common tasks, even if they’re not appropriate in every circumstance.
Documentation: The documentation for Marionette, and to a lesser degree Backbone, is pretty lacking. The Marionette documentation explains how the individual components work but they didn’t provide much insight to the “big picture”. The docs were also missing some explanation into the “why”, which of course lead to StackOverflow answers and then differing viewpoints. Marionette is also short example apps which Backbone does have. The Backbone documentation is thorough, its just a bit hard to navigate and purposefully introduces the “There’s more than one way to do it” mantra.
Anyway, on the whole using Backbone with Marionette to build a Phonegap app was a positive experience. Unfortunately, our clients’ own the code so we can’t release it. That said, we’ll do our best to build something in-house that we can share.
