When working on a web application that involves a lot of JavaScript, one
of the first things you learn is to stop tying your data to the DOM. It's all
too easy to create JavaScript applications that end up as tangled piles of
jQuery selectors and callbacks, all trying frantically to keep data in
sync between the HTML UI, your JavaScript logic, and the database on your
server. For rich client-side applications, a more structured approach
is often helpful.
With Backbone, you represent your data as
Models, which can be created, validated, destroyed,
and saved to the server. Whenever a UI action causes an attribute of
a model to change, the model triggers a "change" event; all
the Views that display the model's data are notified of the
event, causing them to re-render. You don't have to write the glue
code that looks into the DOM to find an element with a specific id,
and update the HTML manually
— when the model changes, the views simply update themselves.
