Over the past year Bocoup has worked on several production applications that utilize the MVC library Backbone.js. We’ve worked hard to give back to the community through informative blog posts, core contributions, support & evangelism through various mediums such as meetups, IRC and Twitter. Over the course of the past year, we created small boilerplates to share around the office and across projects. I recently began to organize this work into a canonical boilerplate for Backbone. Today, I’d like to introduce our Backbone Boilerplate:

Backbone Boilerplate is a set of best practices and utilities for building Backbone.js applications. Out of the box, Backbone Boilerplate gives you:

Backbone, Underscore and jQuery with an HTML5 Boilerplate foundation

Boilerplate module code

A Windows/Mac/Linux build tool for template precompilation and, concatenation & minification of all your libraries, application code and CSS

A Lightweight node.js webserver

Numerous other Backbone snippets for making your life easier

We organized this boilerplate out of the gotchas, pitfalls and common tasks we ran into at Bocoup in 2011. We have collected a plethora of research, knowledge and experience into this repository.

We look forward to continuing to add useful and common Backbone snippets and build tasks. We invite the community to try our boilerplate and give us feedback. This is an initial offering working towards a 1.0 release. Patches are welcome!

Remember, this boilerplate is not meant to be prescriptive. Delete whatever you dislike and tailor it to your own development processes. Fork it, change it, and make pull requests!