While on a project where we were using ElasticSearch extensively, we had a major problem with intermittent test failures. You know, the best kind of test failure. The kind of failure that makes people stop running tests, disable certain tests or blame quality software like Elasticsearch. Oh the pain of non-deterministic failures.
I'll admit it. Six months ago, someone asked me if I was using Vagrant for dev setup. "Oh I usually prefer just to configure whatever I need on my machine." I thought a vm would be overweight, clunky, and slow me down. I was wrong.
We talked last time about models and collections. It's time to move on to Views. Views have quite a bit of responsibility and hold the lion's share of complexity in an application. In a Rails sense of MVC, they have more in common with controllers as they take care of handing data to the actual views, which are actually templates.
In part 1 of this series I took it a little light by introducing the App object. That was in no way specific to Backbone but I wanted to cover it as we'll be seeing it in future posts.
I'm at the tail end of a project where we used a non-trivial amount of the lovely Backbone.js framework. While the documentation is really pretty good, I think you're left with quite a bit of freedom on how to design your application. This may cause some struggles with regard to the architecture and consistency of your system.
It's been a while since I blogged about Single Table Inheritance. You may wonder how that's been working out for me? Well, it's been fantastic! We currently have 7 subclasses each with their own attributes. On boarding our new dev was smooth (read, we weren't too clever) and performance has been great. It's the most heavily used table in our database loading 100s per page with automatic scrolling and refreshing and cocktail onions, etc… We did have a couple additions over the months with and I'd like to share those with you.
UPDATE 1/29/2014: We've released a gem that packages up the techniques described in this post, check it out: hstore_accessor
I came across an interesting image on twitter. I shall not fault the poster, nor the re-tweeter, nor the creator of the original image. But I struggle with leaving my thoughts on the topic unspoken.