Day In Review

The Backbonification (the term of choice at 8th Light) of the Artisan Story Board has been interesting so far. I'm enjoying the opportunity to approach the work I have to do in a iterative modular fashion. As I finish tasks I can start to put them into place independently of the work that is still yet to be done. This is afforded to me by the structure of Backbone.js, which I'm finding to be a really nice library to work with.

I'm also enjoying the opportunity to demystify the storyboard, to an extent. Backbone allows the responsibilities to fall into place naturally and it works out nicely. On one occasion did I have a little trouble finding the correct way to move forward. I have lots of redundancy in two views, namely a view of a story in the backlog and a view of a story on the story board. I first approached the problem with inheritance, but I didn't like my solution. The base class was useless, it was a view without a render method. I then moved away from inheritance and tried to use the Builder pattern to construct the common view and allow each individual view to work from there. I then backed away form this idea because it didn't feel natural. Ultimately, I went back to inheritance but forced the base class to implement the render algorithm but defer certain data plugins to the child classes. I then forced the base class to be abstract (not truly possible in javascript) by forcing an exception to be thrown when instantiating the base class. I like the new design and I feel as though it's a good pattern moving forward.