This is so close to being awesome.<p>There's several showstoppers for me. If you figure out how to fix them, you'll have my business:<p>1). Server side validation. If I can't prevent a CSRF attack, it can't be the basis of my app/website.<p>2). SEO. Figure out a way to serve deep links using the root index.html transparently in a way that is undetectable to the client side (search engines)<p>3). Build in require.js or leverage some other technology to make backbone app codebases manageable yet compressed and performant in the production environment.<p>If you can solve 2 and 3, you solve one of the biggest issues I have when writing backbone apps -- I'm often writing my code twice, often in two separate languages, which isn't DRY and feels like a waste of the efficiencies gained by backbone.<p>If you figure this out, Backbone isn't just for web apps anymore -- it's for any website.
Checkout my post from yesterday to see why I think solutions like this are a <i>bad</i> idea: <a href="http://www.projectorpm.com/blog/2012/03/25/rails-is-more-than-an-api/" rel="nofollow">http://www.projectorpm.com/blog/2012/03/25/rails-is-more-tha...</a><p>(Hint: Don't trust clients)
Nice initiative. I am not a big fan of writing in Javascript but it certainly is a big plus to have such a nice library like backbone.js.<p>Just a tiny point ... About the drawing of the triceratops, he has very mmmmm.... "developed" crotch area. Once you've seen it it's hard to not think about it every time. It's just a little detail but it's a little bit weird!<p>Good luck !
I think I've eaten some stupid soup today. Could someone explain to me what the backend is all about? As far as I see it, the command line creates a backbone template and syncs it with the server. Which is dandy, but as it's client code anyway, that's mostly static web hosting.<p>So now I'm ready to create a hyper-nifty Web 2.71 interface to WHOIS. So normally I'd create a simple web app that serves me my data. Where does backlift come in here, as I'm not doing CRUD all from within the app itself?
I'm rather confused about a few things:<p>1) Is there no index.html?<p>2) Can you develop locally?<p>3) How do you use the templates you showed?<p>4) Is the boilerplate you provide open sourced anywhere?
I'm really happy to see more tools coming out to take some of the effort out of setting up / deploying your development environment. It's refreshing to get more time to actually <i>code</i> rather than administrate systems.<p>Awesome site design as well!
This looks pretty useful today, and I assume will continue to evolve and add more functionality in time. I have very little clue about frontend apps, so I will use something like this to offload a lot of the tool selection process so I can focus on the app itself. I imagine a lot of developers (especially those not on hn) are the same way.
Seems pretty awesome if you have actually taken care of all of the backbone sync backend, so you can just use all of the collection create, update, findAll and everything and it just reads from or updates the database?<p>How do you handle a situation with relationships where you need to specify "give me all of the objects from collection X where parentId is YYYYY"?<p>Also how do you handle sort of arbitrary queries?<p>I was thinking about making a service like this because everyone wants to use Backbone.js.
Just wondering how data validation works for this type of model? If you can't rely on the front end how can you reliably tell the back end what to expect?
seems like this is definitely something that's most useful as an app prototyping tool rather than a deployment environment. and if its a prototyping tool, i'd want it to run locally so i wouldn't have to deal with remote admin / debug<p>so it should probably just be open on github.<p>just throw express or restify in front of mongodb with some minimal scaffolding and generators. if i get a minute i'll try to get something like that up