Migrating MVC to the front-end using Backbone JS

Planbox is a single-page web application for Agile project management. It was built using the traditional MVC stack with CodeIgniter (PHP) and jQuery (Javascript). AJAX was heavily used to update DOM elements to offer a dynamic user experience. UX logic code quickly became spread across Javascript and PHP. The application code base quickly became unmanageable and scaling functionality became difficult. Things had to change.

A decision was made to change architecture: bring all the UX logic in the front-end, and turn the back-end into an engine in charge of business logic.

This talk is about this experience. How we moved the MVC stack from the back-end to the front-end. How we used Backbone JS as the foundation of our front-end framework and built on top. How the backend became a black-box with a Restful API. What lessons we learned, what benefits we gained, and what reflections we made about the future of MVC in Javascript.