Javascript Architecture and Development Practices

Develop
Getting Started
Galaxy API
Source Code
Architecture
Best Practices

How to modify & build JS

All of the JS code can be found in /client. In order to propagate the changes to Galaxy you have to build it using Grunt. This can be done via the following commands:

enter the /client directory

$ cd client

install dependencies through npm (you have to have npm installed)

$ npm install

run the build script

$ grunt

Now all the JS is copied and packed into the proper directories in /static. You can also run

$ grunt watch

to start a watcher that will automatically copy and pack scripts when any save occurs in /client.

Web Stack

In general, our 'Web stack' is:

  • Grunt (building/optimization)
  • requireJS (Requirement management)
  • Backbone (MVC framework)
  • jQuery (basic DOM manipulation)
  • and then individual libraries as needed (D3, Bootstrap, etc)
  • For notifications we use Toastr (https://github.com/CodeSeven/toastr) as require.js module

We made two major framework decisions:

  1. use require to ensure that dependencies are available
  2. use Backbone as class framework