BusterJs is a still-in-beta library that allows for testing your Javascript. It’s got a wealth of cool features. The browser capturing is awesome for running your Javascript directly in the browsers you choose from one runner. You can also execute within Node. In short, it rocks. But, how to get this rockin’ with your project, specifically your AMD RequireJs with BackboneJs combo project is the lock that must be opened before daily buster love can be had.

BackboneJs is a great resource for creating rich UIs. Rich means interactive. Interactivity grows when the client can do more of the work of an application itself, becoming more reactive and dynamic to user feedback, able to be more event-driven, and hopefully more quick and responsive. Here’s a short history of how we’ve been creating rich UIs and a simple example of a rich UI in backbonejs

When you start writing applications with BackboneJS, that means that you’re dealing with some dynamic UI. There are elements being pushed into and pulled out of the DOM. I was having problems trying to reference DOM elements that were dynamically inserted into the DOM by other Backbone views. The fix was simple but not immediately obvious without cracking open Backbone.

BackboneJS is setup to do some pretty sweet single-page app action. And of course, a single page app will probably be wanting to talk to web services on the server. And if your server code is doing the Java jive, then a great way to expose your REST services is via JAX-RS. It’s as easy as Mikey singin’ ABC-123!

Backbone has a great inheritance mechanism. It’s as easy as Backbone.Model.extend(). This much is obvious. Let’s try a few other things, like: Subclassing our own classes, calling to super classes, adding subclass attributes, and adding various subclasses to a collection based on a super class.