CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ajaxbackbone.jswebsocketmarionettesockjs
Vijay Singh
Vijay Singh

Reputation: 277

Backbone with websockets (sockjs) (changing Backbone.ajax vs Backbone.sync)

I have a confusion - If I am implementing websockets (sockjs) on top of Backbone and Marionette, then, in my opinion, it should only require a change in Backbone.ajax function so that socket.emit and socket.on are supported in place of model.save (or collection.save) and model.fetch (or collection.fetch).

However, when I did some research and I found that this was not the case. I came across -
1. Derick Bailey's article:
https://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2012/04/19/decoupling-backbone-apps-from-websockets/
which doesn't even talk about changing Backbone.ajax or Backbone.sync, instead it suggests event aggregation - which is a part of the solution of using websockets but misses the whole point of syncing models and collections. Ok, it does talk about backbone.iobind but only mentions it as an "alternative" approach to event aggregation (however, this is only my reading of the article, I might have missed something!).

2. And Christopher Keefer's article:
http://artandlogic.com/2014/06/websockets-for-backbone/
It does exactly what I want (on socket.io) but it does the job by changing parts of Backbone.sync except Backbone.ajax!

My question is whether Backbone can work for sockjs just by changing its Backbone.ajax function?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 296

Answers (1)

T J
T J

Reputation: 43156

If you want to change your persistence methods, you should override Backbone.sync

Backbone.sync

You can override it in order to use a different persistence strategy, such as WebSockets, XML transport, or Local Storage.

(emphasis mine)

Backbone.sync is your gateway to persistence layer. By default this is handled using AJAX, and in most cases uses jQuery AJAX.

Backbone.ajax

If you want to use a custom AJAX function, or your endpoint doesn't support the jQuery.ajax API and you need to tweak things, you can do so by setting Backbone.ajax.

(emphasis mine)

Backbone.ajax is just a proxy to jQuery AJAX:

Backbone.ajax = function() {
  return Backbone.$.ajax.apply(Backbone.$, arguments);
}

The docs clearly says when you would want to override Backbone.ajax. Another unrealistic example would be when you're using another DOM manipulation library in place of jQuery which doesn't have built in AJAX support exposed using an ajax method.

Backbone.sync method contains code that assumes you're using AJAX (it manipulates an xhr object). That's what you should override. Using ajax method to do something that isn't ajax doesn't even make sense.

Upvotes: 1

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