Developing with Backbone.js and what Drupal can learn from WordPress Media

Backbone.js is a powerful MVC framework for building powerful single-page web applications. The purpose of this session is to provide an overview of how Backbone can greatly expand the possibilities of what you can do with Drupal, and see what's already being done with Backbone in WordPress.

This session will focus on giving you everything you need to get started with Backbone, even if you only know a little bit of jQuery. We will address how Backbone makes building robust front-end projects possible, and do a deep dive into Backbone's flavor of MVC and object-oriented programming. We'll build a simple application on top of an existing Drupal site, connecting to it through the RESTful Web Services module. After we set up our behaviors, you'll learn how functionality can be easily extended by another module or even your own custom theme.

We'll also make a brief stop with the WordPress Media interface, and review what's good (it just works! I can extend this!) and what's not so good (uh... where's the documentation?) to make a case for what's possible with Backbone and show how Drupal could do it even better!