Sagar Ganatra's Blog

The title says it all. Today was my last working day at Adobe and I've decided to pursue my career elsewhere. I've spent more than three and half years at Adobe, working as a part of the ColdFusion Engineering team. Over the last few years I've learnt a lot from the team, from the ColdFusion community and from many others at Adobe. I've developed interests in HTML5, JavaScript and other related technologies and frameworks and I've decided to pursue my interests.

I've been trying to build a CRUD application using Backbone.js and was able to retrieve a set of records into a collection using the fetch method . To perform other operations i.e. Create, Update and Delete I could always invoke Backbone.sync but I was exploring on the lines where this is performed implicitly. The fetch method sends an implicit GET request on url specified in the Collection, similarly I was looking for other methods that allow you to send POST, PUT and DELETE requests to the url. While I was building this application, I did come across a condition where Backbone was not sending a request. I was finally able to figure out as to why that happened and then it was a simple fix in my Backbone application as well as in the REST service.

From past few weeks, I've been learning Backbone.js in great detail and I think it's a great framework that helps you modularize your code easily. Last week I wrote about ' Model validation in constructor ' and then started to look at Collections in Backbone. The Model objects can be viewed as table rows and the Collection as a table. A Collection can declare the model property and indicate what kind of data it will hold. I was looking into ways in which a Collection can be populated by fetching the model data from the server. One way to do that is to ask the Model to fetch the data and then add the response to the Collection . The other way of doing this is to fetch the Collection data directly from the server i.e. instead of defining a Model you create a Collection by fetching the data from the server. Usually when you send a request to the server, the response data is essentially a collection of objects. In this case you really don't need a Model to be defined. ...

I've started to look at various Design Patterns in JavaScript and one of most popular Design Patterns in any language is the MVC Pattern. In JavaScript, there are various libraries out there which helps in modularizing the application. However, I've heard a lot about Backbone.js and I thought this would be the right time to give it a try. I've not learnt Backbone completely, but I've gained a good understanding of the Model part of the MVC in Backbone.

Last week I'd played around with couple of design patterns in JavaScript ( Constructor and Module pattern ). I really liked the Module pattern i.e. the approach taken in JavaScript to enable encapsulation of data in a Class (functions in JavaScript). I was building an application using these Design patterns but found that making Ajax request inside a function in a module was not the right approach. JavaScript would send a request and start executing the next statement. I wanted to use an approach that would push the data from the Model whenever there was some new data available. This lead me to try the 'Observer pattern' in JavaScript.

Couple of days back I wrote about the Constructor Pattern in JavaScript  wherein I explained how classes can be simulated using functions in JavaScript. Also, on how the prototype property can be used to extend another class. The other important element in any of the Object-Oriented programming language is the concept of encapsulation i.e. providing private members that can be accessed only by the members of the same class. I came across the Module Pattern today and found that it is quite easy to achieve encapsulation in JavaScript. Though the variables in JavaScript can't be declared as private or public, but closures can be used to emulate encapsulation.

Over the last few weeks I've been learning Object-Oriented concepts in JavaScript and have been building applications on top of it. I've an understanding of Object-Oriented concepts in many of the Server side programming languages and was trying to draw parallel lines with JavaScript. As it turns out, JavaScript is a class-less language but the concept of classes can be simulated using functions. In JavaScript, functions are not primitive types but are special kind of objects and hence you can set properties on them and can also invoke methods on them.