Coinery

A BTC-denominated storefront for buying & selling your digital goods. Created as part of the 2014 BitHack

App structure

Rails + Backbone living together in relative harmony.

The Backbone app is completely separate from the rails app and can be found in the backbone/ dir. The Rails app is configured to serve public assets from backbone/public/

backbone/
|-- app/
|   |-- router.coffee
|   |-- app.coffee
|   |-- init.coffee
|   |-- models/
|   |   |-- user.coffee
|   |   |-- product.coffee
|   |-- collections/
|   |   |-- products.coffee
|   |-- templates/
|   |   |-- nav.hbs
|   |   |-- footer.hbs
|   |-- assets/
|   |   |-- index.html
|   |   |-- img/
|   |   |-- css/
|   |-- sass/
|   |   |-- app.sass
|   |   |-- _partial.sass
|-- public/
|   |-- index.html
|   |-- img/
|   |-- css/
|   |-- js/

We compile coffeescript and sass and build the webapp with a handy tool called Brunch (http://brunch.io/) Brunch uses Bower for js dependency management.

Running the app locally

Install necessary gems

$ bundle install

Install compass locally

gem install compass

Install node.js (which comes with npm automatically) if not already installed

$ brew install node

Add node to your $PATH in ~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshrc or wherever your terminal configs sit if not already added

export PATH=/usr/local/bin/node_modules:$PATH
export PATH=/usr/local/bin/node:$PATH

Start the thin server

$ thin start

Install Brunch and Bower (specified in package.json)

$ cd backbone
$ npm install bower -g
$ npm install brunch -g

Fetch JS dependencies with Bower (one time only)

$ bower install

Build the webapp with Brunch and monitor for changes

$ brunch build
$ brunch watch

The webapp should now be running at localhost:3000

Using Node/CommonJS modules in Backbone

A module is a discrete unit of code with a well defined interface.

When using CommonJS modules, every file has dependencies (require statements) and exports:

Example:

# in house.coffee

Lamp = require('lamp')

enter = () ->
  Lamp.on()

leave = () ->
  Lamp.off()

module.exports =
  'enter': enter
  'leave': leave

Here's an example of a few discrete Backbone modules

# in models/user.coffee

Product = require 'models/product'

module.exports = Class User extends Backbone.Model

  url: ''

  initialize: ->
    sample = new Product
      price: '12'
      name: 'Ebook'

    @set 'products', [sample,]

# in views/login.coffee

User = require 'models/user'

module.exports = Class LoginView extends Backbone.View

  events:
    'submit form': 'loginHandler'

  loginHandler: (e) ->
    @user = new User()
    @user.fetch

http://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/modules.html#modules_modules