Step 6: Building the Backend

The UI is in pretty good shape. It’s time to start hooking this up to a backend. Backend needs to support a few basic operations. We will design this service following REST principles, so the basic URLs will be as follows (note that actual URLs used by a particular technology may vary, but the essential purpose will be the same: <ol> <li>GET /tasks – This request should return all of the tasks defined for the current user.</li> <li>GET taskURL – Returns the task for a specific URL.</li> <li>POST /tasks – This request will create a new task, assigning it a unique guid. It should return a 204 with a Location header for the new record.</li> <li>PUT taskURL – This request will update the state of a specified task</li> <li>DELETE taskURL – This request will delete the specified task</li> </ol> For our design, each task’s GUID will be the URL that it actually belongs to. Each request above accepts and posts JSON as its primary payload. You can easily design services that accept and return multiple formats, but the fastest most convenient format is JSON. You can generally design a SproutCore application to work with any backend format that you like. However, if you follow some standard conventions, it will be easy for the the built-in RestServer to use it. Here are the formats: Each record is formatted as a simple data hash like so: <pre><code>{ guid: "/task/123", title: "Task description" isDone: true | false } </code></pre> For requests that involve a single resource, you could simply pass this data hash, but this would not allow you to pass other meta-data about the resource that might be useful for debugging or other purposes. Instead, data hashes are usually passed as a content property. Here is the example format when you retrieve the data for a single task: <pre><code>{ content: { guid: "/task/123", title: "Task description", order: 1, isDone: false } }</code></pre> For the index request (that returns all of the tasks), the content property is simply an array of data hashes: <pre><code>{ content: [ { guid: "/task/123", title: "Task description", order: 1, isDone: false }, { guid: "/task/345", title: "Task description", order: 2, isDone: false } ] }</code></pre> SproutCore is backend agnostic. It can work with any backend server technology that you want to use. At this point in the tutorial, we are going to play “choose your own adventure”. Depending on the backend technology you want to use you can choose any tutorial listed below. If a tutorial for your favorite server technology is not listed here, consider following another tutorial and then writing a version for your favorite technology and adding it here. We’re going to start with Merb, because it is installed as part of the SproutCore build tools. <ul> <li>[[Building with Merb]] (for Merb 0.9.3) – Merb is a Ruby-based server-side MVC framework similar to Rails, but smaller and faster.</li> <li>[[Building with Merb 1.0]] – Merb is a Ruby-based server-side MVC framework similar to Rails, but smaller and faster.</li> </ul> If you write a tutorial, for your favorite tech here…first of all, thank you! Second, please name the starting page “Building with X”, where X is your technology and link to it just like the merb example above. Please keep the list of tutorials above in alphabetical order based on technology name. Thanks! <h1>Related Links</h1> <h1>Comments</h1> Updated by Daniel Kehoe on 17 January 2009 to add a link to [[Building with Merb 1.0]] 2008-08-01T20:13:35-07:00 41823 step-6-building-the-backend

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