Exoskeleton

Exoskeleton is a faster and leaner Backbone for your HTML5 apps.

http://exosjs.com

What already works

All features you need for real-world app are working. All software tests are passing: (libs = underscore and jquery)

• Backbone: with and without libs
• Chaplin: with and without libs

Marionette and other popular plugins: WIP.

Building

Default and custom builds:

make # Will create exoskeleton.js
make noutils # If you want to use Underscore and jQuery
             # and don't want to include `Exoskeleton.utils`.
make min     # Minified version.
# Custom, like this:
cat lib/{header,events,collection,sync,history,footer}.js > exoskeleton.js

Features

• Custom builds
• No hard dependencies on underscore or jquery
• Support for Bower and Component(1)
• AMD support
• Speed: blazing fast when used without jQuery.

Also:

• Router with query string support
• All params are allowed for model attributes, for example model.get('constructor') (jashkenas/backbone#1495)
• Event triggering on disposed objects is 20 times faster

Differences

• When jQuery is not used, you must use event.delegateTarget instead of event.currentTarget for event delegation. This is because currentTarget is not overridable on native non-jQuery events.
• Declaratively defined view events which point to non-existing handler functions are no longer tolerated / skipped. Early error is thrown instead.

• In no-underscore environment, there are no underscore-inspired Collection methods (each, pluck etc.), but there are ES5-inspired methods:

  forEach, map, filter, some, every, reduce, reduceRight, indexOf, lastIndexOf

  Also, no underscore-inspired Model methods at all.

• emulateHTTP and emulateJSON were removed

Exoskeleton 0.7.0 (4 August 2014)

• Breaking: Align Exoskeleton with latest Backbone (specifically jashkenas/backbone#3003).
  • Remove View#find, View#findAll, and View#useNative
  • Remove utils.matchesSelector, utils.delegate, and utils.delegate
  • Remove keepOld property from delegateEvents. Use delegate to add individual events now.
  • All hooks from jashkenas/backbone#3003. Instructions here.
• Add Router#execute and Router#atRoot
• Add Collection#_addReference
• Add _.has to utils
• Remove utils.ajax in favor of a plugin
• Model#toJSON now extends a plain object (not one created with Object.create(null) for compatibility with third party libs.)

Exoskeleton 0.6.3 (16 December 2013)

• Added View#useNative property. Works great if you want to include jQuery and still use native methods for some views. Just set it to true in them.

Exoskeleton 0.6.2 (14 December 2013)

• Added support for data option in utils.ajax.

Exoskeleton 0.6.1 (9 December 2013)

• Fixed handling of missing common.js jQuery dependency.

Exoskeleton 0.6.0 (28 November 2013)

• Breaking: removed View#delegate and View#undelegate. These methods now reside in utils and can be excluded in custom builds.
• Collection model ids can now be arbitrary js props. E.g. collection.get('toString').
• Collection#find now works in no-underscore environment.

Exoskeleton 0.5.1 (3 November 2013)

• Added support for contentType option in utils.ajax

Exoskeleton 0.5.0 (2 November 2013)

• Fixed behaviour in node.js environment.
• Backbone.Deferred now must return actual Deferred ({promise, resolve, reject} object).
• Removed Backbone.resolveDeferred.
• Added beforeSend option to utils.ajax.
• Moved utils.ajax({method}) option to {type}.
• When used with custom build of lodash, Collection and Model will now use all existing methods.
• Improved performance of event triggering.

Exoskeleton 0.4.0 (29 October 2013)

• Default AJAX functionality is now covered by utils.ajax
• Added Backbone.Deferred and Backbone.resolveDeferred. Promise returned by Backbone.Deferred is returned via ajax.
• Fixed IE support.
• Removed utils.sortedIndex.
• Small optimisations.

Exoskeleton 0.3.1 (24 October 2013)

• Fix broken bower.json package

Exoskeleton 0.3.0 (24 October 2013)

• Declaratively defined view events which point to non-existing handler functions are no longer tolerated / skipped. Early error is thrown instead.

Exoskeleton 0.2.2 (21 October 2013)

• All Chaplin tests are now passing.
• Added utils.matchesSelector.

Exoskeleton 0.2.1 (19 October 2013)

• Fixed AMD support.

Exoskeleton 0.2.0 (19 October 2013)

• jQuery is now 100% optional, just like underscore.
• All backbone tests are passing with and without jQuery.

Exoskeleton 0.1.0 (13 October 2013)

• Initial release