During the last year or so I have been building quite a few apps on top of Backbone.js. The reason for choosing Backbone.js was the fact it’s fairly low level. It does not get in my way when I want to integrate some random crappy jQuery plugings or swap Ajax backend to Websockets in to my apps etc. Also it doesn’t isolate me to inside some framework wonderland jail. I really had to learn how to work with the DOM and how to arrange my code. This is good in the since it has given me good foundations how things generally work if I ever want to venture into some other frameworks.

But there is a downside to all this low levelness. With certain aspects you are really left alone by the framework. For me the hardest part was how to handle nested views.

Backbone.ViewMaster

I think I’ve found some good patterns on how to handle them. Originally I wanted to just write a blog post about them, but more I looked my code I realized it would be better as a library, because they were not that trivial in the end.

This not by any means unique. There are several libraries that can help you with nested views. I would guess the most notable ones are backbone.layoutmanager and Marionette.js. But I wanted something simpler. So here’s Backbone.ViewMaster:

http://epeli.github.com/backbone.viewmaster/

It is just a single Backbone.js View which can be used as the base view when building Backbone.js apps. It tries to be more than just a library as it encourages on writing decoupled and reusable views. Read the tutorial to get gist of it.