Mentor Me Mobile App

Main languages are CoffeeScript, Stylus for CSS pre-processing and Handlebars for templating.

Main JS framework is Backbone.js

Application assembler is Brunch

Installation

First install Node.js and NPM(node package manager).

To install all the application dependencies run npm install in the project root directory. This will download all the packages to a folder node_modules in your project root.

To "assemble" the application once run brunch build. To continually watch for changes, use brunch watch. This will assemble/compile the project into the public/ directory. This directory will contain all the necessary javascript, css, and html to run the application.

Brunch will automatically download all bower dependencies (app dependencies) defined in bower.json, but feel free to run bower install to pre-install them into bower_componentes. These dependencies get put in the vendor.js file generated by brunch for our app.

To actually run and view the application you can serve the public/ directory as a static folder using your preferred webserver. I use Pow which is a great zero-configuration rack server which can also be used to map a dev url mentormeapp.dev to a static rack server included in server.js

Alternatively, you can also run brunch watch --server which will startup a basic webserver to serve your project to the browser. Look at the Brunch docs for more information.

Overview

config.coffee
README.md
/app/
  /assets/
    index.html
    images/
  styles/
  helpers/
  collections/
  config/
    ApplicationConfig.coffee <---- Application-wide settings including SERVER URL to pull data from
  events/
  utils/
  models/
  routers/
  styles/
  templates/
  views/

  MentorMe.coffee <---- Main Marionette.Application
  initialize.coffee
/test/
/vendor/
  scripts/
    backbone.js
    jquery.js
    console-helper.js
    underscore.js
  styles/
    normalize.css
    helpers.css

• config.coffee contains configuration of your app. You can set plugins / languages that would be used here. Also the build order of the coffeescript files is defined here
• app/assets contains images / static files. Contents of the directory would be copied to public/ without change. Other app/ directories could contain files that would be compiled. Languages, that compile to JS (coffeescript, roy etc.) or js files and located in app are automatically wrapped in a Require.js module closure so they can be loaded by require('module/location').
• app/[models,collections,controllers,models,routers,views] contain the majority of the application code composed of Backbone and Marionette models, controllers, views, etc. Read Backbone.js and Marionette.js documentation for more info.
• app/styles contains Stylus and Sass templates that are compiled to CSS.
• test/ contains feature & unit tests.
• vendor/ contains all third-party code. The code wouldn’t be wrapped in modules, it would be loaded instantly instead.

This all will generate public/ (by default) directory when brunch build or brunch watch is executed.

Other

Versions of software the skeleton uses:

• jQuery 2.1
• Backbone 1.0.0
• Backbone.Marionette 1.8.6
• Underscore 1.6.0