Exoskeleton is a faster and leaner Backbone for your HTML5 apps.
- Do you develop mobile apps?
- Do you want to optimise your app size and execution speed five-fold?
- Don't want to have kilobytes of JavaScript you don't use?
- Don't want new developers of your app to learn three libraries instead of one?
Exoskeleton is just for you!
or install with package managers:
bower install --save exoskeletoncomponent install paulmillr/exoskeleton
Why Exoskeleton
Underscore is 100% optional in Exoskeleton. You can just throw it away.
Instead of including 40K of gzipped JavaScript, you just need to include 8K — that's five times less! Use Backbone.NativeView and Backbone.NativeAjax to get rid of jQuery too.
Your views will be rendered up to 5.5 times faster* when Exoskeleton is used without jQuery. They will also consume 2 times less memory.
Mobile apps want this kind of performance.
* Tested view creating / rendering time using Exoskeleton against Backbone 1.1 + jQuery 2.0 in Chrome and Firefox.
Don't need Router? No problem. Using your own Models? You've got it!
All stuff for old browsers is out by default — IE10 is the minimum here.
You can just replace Backbone with Exoskeleton and it will all work as before.
Exoskeleton passes 100% of Backbone and Chaplin test suites with or without dependencies.
Support for optional deps in other frameworks like Marionette is coming soon, our team is on it!
Exoskeleton is AMD and Common.js-friendly. ES6 support is coming soon.
Package managers support is here. Manage your exoskeleton dependency like it's 2013.
Regular semver-compatible updates, that's it.
Exoskeleton incorporates other great features and bugfixes.
Custom features
Also take a look at Exoskeleton changelog.- Router with query string support
View#delegateEventshaskeepOldoption that allows to preserve old events.- All params are allowed for model attributes, for example
model.get('constructor')(backbone#1495) - Ultra-fast event delegation via native
utils.delegatemethod. - Event triggering on disposed objects is up to 20 times faster
Backbone.Deferredoverridable method for custom promise libraries or DOM promisesView#useNativeproperty. Works great if you want to include jQuery and still use native methods for some views. Just set it to `true` in them.
Differences from Backbone
- When jQuery is not used, you must use
event.delegateTargetinstead ofevent.currentTargetfor event delegation. This is becausecurrentTargetis 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 / lodash 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, lastIndexOfAlso, no underscore-inspired Model methods at all.
- No hash-based routing. Just pushState
- emulateHTTP and emulateJSON were removed
- Exoskeleton adds `utils` namespace to store most useful utility functions:
matchesSelector, result, defaults, extend, escape, sortBy, uniqueId, isEqual. If you intend to use Exoskeleton with underscore or lodash, you may want to drop utils from custom build.
Documentation, getting started and other stuff
For initial release, you can check out backbone docs. Exoskeleton docs are coming soon.
Check out also:
- Exoskeleton TodoMVC example (source)
- Chaplin guide on dropping dependencies on Underscore and jQuery
- Commit switching from Backbone to Exoskeleton in ost.io
- Developing Backbone apps by Addy Osmani
- Great list of tutorials and blog posts on Backbone wiki
- Extensions, plugins and resources
- Single-page application example built with Exoskeleton and CommonJS Compiler (source)
