Organizing Backbone Applications - Structure, Optimize, and Deploy

Backbone itself doesn't provide any application structure or guidance on how to organize the application source code. This makes it quite difficult for beginner-level programmers to understand how to create a folder structure, add proper namespaces, load script files in the appropriate order, and follow patterns to create a robust app architecture. We will see how to do so in this article by Swarnendu De, author of Backbone.js Patterns and Best Practices.

Grunt in Action

In this article by Jaime Pillora, author of Getting Started with Grunt: The JavaScript Task Runner, we will perform additional transformations on set of source files by using Grunt.

Intents for Mobile Components

In this article by Wajahat Karim, the author of the book "Learning Android Intents" has discussed some of the applications of intents with a more practical approach. Also, he has discussed the mobile components that are commonly found in all Android phones.

Now, we will see how these mobile components can be accessed and used very easily via intents. Android provides a vast collection of libraries and features through which a developer can utilize mobile components. This is as easy as a walk in the park. This article mainly includes four different categories of components: visual components such as camera, communication components such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, media components such as video and audio recording, speech recognition, and text-to-speech conversion, and finally, motion components such as proximity sensor. The following topics will be discussed in this article:

• Common mobile components
• Components and intents
• Communication components
• Using Bluetooth through intents
• Using Wi-Fi through intents
• Media components
• Taking pictures and recording video through intents
• Speech recognition using intents
• Role of intents in text-to-speech conversion
• Motion components
• Proximity alerts through intents

The concepts and structures of intents are the prerequisites for understanding this article.

Your First Application

Having learned about the conventions and responsibilities in Laravel, and how to create a new project with Composer, you are now ready to build your first application!

In this article by Raphaël Saunier, author of Getting Started with Laravel 4, you will use the concepts presented previously in a practical way and learn how to do the following:

• Sketch out the URLs and entities of your application
• Troubleshoot common issues when getting started
• Define the routes and their actions as well as the models and their relationships
• Prepare your database and learn how to interact with it using Eloquent
• Use the Blade template language to create hierarchical layouts

The first step in creating a web application is to identify and define its requirements. Then, once the main features have been formulated, we derive the main entities as well as the URL structure of the application. Having a well-defined set of requirements and URLs is also essential for other tasks such as testing; this will be covered later in the book.

A lot of new concepts are presented in this article. If you have trouble understanding something or if you are not quite sure where to place a particular snippet of code, you can download the annotated source code of the application on http://packtpub.com/support, which will help you to follow along.