Marionette Guides

Have you ever wanted to be a puppet master? Now, through the power of JavaScript, you can pull the strings and make your applications dance! This book will take you through the journey from Punch and Judy to Master of Puppets.

This book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of the Backbone and Marionette frameworks for JavaScript. From the basics of installing and setting up your first JavaScript app to developing a complex full-featured application that can integrate with multiple web services, navigate your user through your systems from any arbitrary entry point, and take full advantage of the latest JavaScript and HTML5 features.

What is Marionette?

Marionette is a flexible web app framework that helps you build your apps quickly and integrated into any of your web service backends easily.

Marionette is built on the popular Backbone.js framework - with a major upgrade of the View layer of the MVC/MVVM application design pattern. In essence, Marionette gives you a set of simple, yet powerful, components for building your web applications that handle the, sometimes messy, business of rendering your data and handling user and server input on your application and data.

Marionette Version

This Guide covers version 2.4 of Marionette. Since this guide was published, Marionette 3 has been released with some major improvements. We would recommend you use the newer versions where possible. This guide will continue to cover version 2 and we will link to a separate guide covering version 3 when it becomes available.

Where Do I Start?

Firstly, check out our installation instructions and our getting started guide. If you have a particular topic that you're interested in, our contents page should guide you in the right direction.

For those just looking for a quick reference, the [Marionette reference][reference] should be your next port of call.

Contribute

Do you see something that can be improved? Perhaps you know something about Marionette that will be a great help. It might just be a typo but we welcome any and all contributions to making this book the definitive source for working with Marionette.

How Can I Help?

This book is maintained on Github and built using GitBook. Just pop over and open an issue or just make and edit and submit a Pull Request.

Get Started with Marionette

There are a number of ways you can start with Marionette depending on how familiar you are working with JavaScript. You can follow the tutorial, learn about different Marionette topics, or jump into the reference documentation.

Summary

• Introduction
• Why Marionette?
• Getting Started
  • Installing Marionette
  • Installing Marionette Inspector
  • Tutorial
  • Your first view
  • Adding new items
  • Laying out your page
  • Summary
• Views
  • Lists of Data
  • Structuring your App
  • Events and Triggers
    • Built-in Triggers
• Templates
• Creating an Application
  • Integrating with Routing
  • Multiple Application Starters
• Implementing Routing
  • Attaching Controllers
• Sharing common view Behavior
  • Example Behaviors
• Handling Data Latency
• Dealing with Complex Persisted Data
• Nesting Your Views
• Passing Data with Events
• FAQ
• Cookbook
• Appendix
  • Tutorial
    • Todo app
  • Routing
    • Full router example