Backbone provides you with models, collections, and views – the core principles of Model-View-Controller development – for your JavaScript applications. As for synchronising the data between the client-side and server-side? Well Backbone has a neck for that too, a simple RESTful JSON interface connector. An example of a Backbone model and collection looks something like the following:

var book = new Backbone.Model({
  id     : '1-the-tempest',
  title  : "The Tempest",
  author : "Bill Shakespeare",
  length : 123
});

var Collection = Backbone.Collection.extend({
  url: function() { return '/collection'; }
});

var library = new Collection();
library.add(book);

This library also hooks into jQuery for some aspects of it, which could be a winning point, considering all the talk of MVC for jQuery. For those concerned about the size of your JavaScript, fear not, as the production version of Backbone weighs in at a tiny 2kb.

If you’re developing a JavaScript-heavy application, Backbone.js definitely gives you something to stand on.

[Source on GitHub] [Documentation]

The post backbone: Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events appeared first on The Changelog.

Well, not anymore, now there’s a solution that appears to cover all the common issues, it was released earlier this month. Created by Anup Narkhede, MooModel is an ORM and Data Modeller built on top of the MooTools library.

var Post = new Class({
  Extends: MooModel.Base
});

var post = new Post({id: 1, name: "bean", description: "lorem"})
post.save();

Post.find(1); // {id: 1, name: "bean", description: "lorem"}

Currently MooModel isn’t CommonJS compatible and doesn’t work on the MooTools ServerSide project. However, Anup does mention in a blog post about the project that he is working on support for both CommonJS and MooTools Serverside.

The readme for MooModel is fairly light, which doesn’t matter too much, as Anup has written up a quite comprehensive documentation containing the usage of the library on his blog.

[Source on GitHub] [Introduction & Documentation]

The post MooModel: Data Modelling for MooTools appeared first on The Changelog.

One of the often forgotten things is that without good feedback from users, the tools that are core to the open source ecosystem today would not be able to become better and progress further.

Sometimes it’s hard to know just how to give feedback on the tools that we take for granted, however, the development community of Git have taken the initiative to setup a survey to gather annual feedback on the project from it’s users.

If you have five or ten minutes free today, why not fill out the completely anonymous survey for Git User’s — I know I will be!

[Take the Survey]

The post Git User’s Survey 2010 appeared first on The Changelog.

Previously we’ve talked about other projects by both Marak Squires and Charlie Robbins, well, Node-CloudServers is their latest installment in what is quickly becoming their robust platform for Node.js deployment. That said, they are providing most of the components of their platform as open source, their latest piece is accompanied by a comprehensive blog post on how to get started with this new node.js module.

This project is different to most, in that it’s got the commercial backing of a NYC Startup while still being open source. After a quick word with Marak he stated, “It [node-cloudservers] is currently 0.1.0, but actively under development and is supported”.

One important note about this new module is that in order to use it, you will need an account on Rackspace’s CloudServers service — and that includes to run the tests for the code at this point.

[Source on GitHub] [Quickstart Article]

The post node-cloudservers: Node.js Meets Rackspace Cloud appeared first on The Changelog.

Currently git-extras includes:

• git summary
• git changelog
• git commits-since
• git count
• git delete-branch
• git delete-tag
• git ignore
• git release
• git contrib
• git repl

Most cover tasks such as counting commit contributions, or viewing commits based on time, others include changelog generation based on commits and quickly adding items to the .git-ignore file. The extras are also quite easy to install, just clone the repository, then [sudo] make install.

[source on github]

The post Git Extras: Helpful tools for Git appeared first on The Changelog.

Selene is an C library that sits on top of your SSL/TLS library — currently only OpenSSL is supported — providing an asynchronous API for interacting with it. Currently selene is in an early stage of development, but aims towards the following goals:

• Completely Asynchronous: it does no IO itself, but provides notifications that IO should be done.
• Test Driven Development: A test framework to test all code paths.
• Pluggable Backends for Cryptography: Currently only focusing on OpenSSL, but others are possible.

Selene is definitely something that you are probably going to want to checkout if you’re working with SSL/TLS and want to get the best performance and throughput possible.

[Source on Github] [Mailing List]

The post Selene: Asynchronous SSL/TLS appeared first on The Changelog.

Nitrode boasts pretty impressive features for a first release, some notable features including:

• Virtual Host Configuration
• Redirection
• ETags and If-Modified-Since support
• Static file serving
• SSL support
• HTTP Basic Authentication

For now, there’s an example.js file up in the repository on github, and it’s author, Oliver Morgan still says there’s a lot of work to be done on it.

[Source on GitHub] [Release notes]

The post Nitrode: A lightweight HTTP Server on top of Node.js appeared first on The Changelog.