Central Message Bus

So armed with Marionette and Eclipse templates, I made some good progress on the dashboard. The additional pieces provided by Marionette are not only helping in reducing boilerplate code, they are also helping me think more clearly about my application.

The dashboard now comprises of several independent views that talk to each other via a message bus. A message bus or event aggregator is something on which any object in your app can trigger an event or listen for an event. So instead of directly subscribing for events on each other, they now only talk to the message bus. This decouples them and makes them reusable.

For example, the Publication Importer view I wrote is reusable in two ways. One is that it can be embedded anywhere in the app and it should work. It is also a blueprint for how to write import views for other resources. It looked like I can factor out a base class from the view that can be configured/overridden for building any number of import views.

I started with converting the basic views to Marionette and I am slowly building up to a Marionette application. Tomorrow I hope to get to the point where I can start working on the main character in this cast - the writing desk.