Quick Left's love affair with the Backbone.js library has culminated in our very first training event, Intro to Backbone.js. We've implemented Backbone in a variety of different web applications both internally and for our customers, so it was only natural to share some of that experience in the form of a hands-on workshop.

In addition to Raise Your Voice, we’re excited to announce that another awesome client of ours, OpDemand, just came out of Beta. You can read the full press release here.

Most Backbone apps require some sort of bootstrapping process to initialize themselves with data, here's how we've been using Deferred objects to make this easier.

Last week I blogged in part I about how to build single page apps with no AJAX by using dnode, a remote method invokation library for the browser. This allows you to directly invoke server functions from your client side JavaScript without setting up any HTTP routes. This week we want to look more closely about how to overwrite Backbone.sync to make this work smoothly. But first you need to make sure that you connect to dnode successfully and get the db object from the backend exposed correctly off your root namespace object.

If you are like us here at QuickLeft, you have been writing a lot more single page JavaScript apps recently using frameworks like Backbone. Backbone is actually the only Model-View-Controller JS framework we have used much so far and in Backbone you send and receive data from your server by default using Rails style REST-ful AJAX calls.

For many developers, Javascript exists as a utility; chunks of procedural code strung together to loosely define how the user interacts with a document that is part of a larger web application. Here are a couple points about the paradigm shift required to start utilizing Backbone.js, and some valuable lessons learnt.