Ribcage

Ribcage for your Backbone

Ribcage is a set of mixins and libraries to make developing Backbone applications easier and more strucutred. It's also a set of opinions on how you should develop a web application.

Requirements

Ribcage depends on Backbone (surprised?) and jQuery.

Installing

Ribcage modules are in UMD format. This means that you can use them either as AMD modules (with loaders like RequireJS), or load them using <script> tags.

When loading modules using the <script> tags, please make sure main.js is loaded before all other modules. It will set up the ribcage global object and other modules will simply assume that properties on that object have been correctly set up.

When used with <script> tags, the modules will do basic dependency checking, so you will get exceptions in many cases.

When using Ribcage as AMD modules, you can either require the entire Ribcage using the ribacge/ribcage module, or you can require indivudal parts by loading them as separate modules. Note that some Ribcage modules may depend on other Ribcage modules (e.g., TemplateView depends on BaseView).

Installing using volo

If you are using volo, you can safely install ribcage using the usual add command:

volo add foxbunny/ribcage

It will be installed into lib/ribcage directory, and lib/ribcage.js module will be created as an alias for lib/ribcage/main.js.

The CoffeeScript sources are located in the src directory, and are not installed by volo. If you want to use the CoffeeScript version instead, simply manually copy them into your project.

Application project template

There are two application templates that provide a good base and also a simple example of a Ribcage app. One of them is for CoffeeScript developers, and the other is for JavaScript ninjas.

The templates set up a Backbone application with Ribcage. You can use volo to kickstart a project using the templates:

volo create my_app foxbunny/create-ribcage-app # CoffeeScript
volo create my_app foxbunny/create-ribcage-app-js # JavaScript

Minified and concatenated version

No, there are none and there will never be. Why minify a single component when there's a whole project to be minified?

Documentation

Please see the Ribcage wiki for introductory and cookbook articles.

The complete API documentation is available in markdown format in the doc directory. The directory layout reflects the layout of the src directory as each source code file generates one matching Markdown document. You may want to start with the main module documenation which contains links to all Ribcage modules.

Reporting bugs

Please report bugs to Ribcage's GitHub issue tracker.