layout: post

title: RESThub 2.0 Spring and Backbone.js stack released

author: bclozel

tags: [resthub, java]

published: true

We are pleased to announce the second major release of RESThub!


RESThub 2.0 stack is based on **Spring and Backbone.js**, and is designed to build HTML5 applications easily and efficiently. RESThub focuses on modular web applications, made of **stateless REST web services** and **client-side state managed by MVVM JavaScript clients**.

Spring stack

RESThub Spring stack 2.0 is based on:

- Java 7 by default, but Java 6 is fine too

- Tomcat 7

- Spring 3.1 including Profile and JavaConfig support

- Spring MVC 3.1 and Jackson 2 for REST webservices (including full handling of Object Graphs with cyclic references)

- SQL and NoSQL persistence with Spring Data

- Logging with SLF4J and Logback

- Maven 3.0 is the reference build tool used

- TestNG, FEST Fluent Assertions 2 and Mockito for testing

It provides the following features:

- Guidelines for your project and configuration layout

- Project templates for Spring + Backbone.js web applications (simple or multi-module)

- Zero config support for JPA (with automatic JPA Entity scanning) or MongoDB databases

- Generic CRUD webservices (XML and JSON by default) with builtin Exception to HTTP response mapper

- Helpers for running web tests

- Easy to use HTTP client based on AsyncHttplient with OAuth 2.0 support

- Logging bridge allow to send Javascript logs to the server

- High performance and easy to monitore [RPC mechanism based on RabbitMQ and Hessian](https://github.com/resthub/spring-amqp-hessian)

- [Spring MVC router](https://github.com/resthub/springmvc-router) allow to use routes à la Ruby On Rails/Play Framework

Backbone Spring stack 2.0 artifacts are available on Maven Central.

[Reference documentation](http://resthub.org/spring-stack.html) | [Javadoc](http://resthub.org/javadoc/2.0) | [Tutorial](http://resthub.org/tutorial/spring.html) | [Sources](https://github.com/resthub/resthub-spring-stack)

Backbone.js stack

RESThub Backbone.js stack 2.0 is based on:

- Backbone.js 0.9.2 + carefully selected extensions

- Powerful Pageable/Sortable datagrig with Backbone Datagrid (made by Loïc Frering, a RESThub developer)

- Get and set relations (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one) for Backbone models with Backbone relational

- Form validation with Backbone Validation

- Parameters support on view routing with Backbone Query Parameters

- Require.js 2.0 for script loading including JS/CSS optimizer

- Handlebars 1.0 for templating

- jQuery 1.7

- Twitter Bootstrap 2.1

- Asynchronous calls with Async

- Dispatching keyboard shortcuts with Keymaster

- Parsing, validating, manipulating, and formatting dates and times with Moment

If provides the following features:

- Guidelines for your project layout

- Project templates for easy project bootstrapping

- Resthub.View extends Backbone.View to provide the following enhancements:

- Default rendering implementation based on Handlebars

- $root attribute used to specify the container root element where the view should be attached (since $el is the view itself)

- Default template attribute with context management

- Zombie view and event handler cleanup

- A new populateModel function that automatically populate a model objet from form values (mapped on element names)

- A client to server Javascript logger, a simple but lifesaver feature when your application run in production

- Additional Handlebars helpers

- A Require.js/Handlebars plugin

- A simple Publish/Subscribe mechanism

[Download](https://github.com/downloads/resthub/resthub-backbone-stack/resthub-backbone-stack-2.0.0.zip) | [Reference documentation](http://resthub.org/backbone-stack.html) | [Tutorial](http://resthub.org/tutorial/backbone.html) | [Sources](https://github.com/resthub/resthub-backbone-stack)

Try it now!

You can try now the [example "Todo application" live](http://resthub.org/todo/) and [take a look at the code](https://github.com/resthub/todo-backbone-example).

[Reference documentation](http://resthub.org/) is available for both Spring and Backbone stacks.

Feel free to contact us on [RESThub discussion group](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/resthub-dev) if you need help or want to send us some feedbacks.

The rationale behind RESThub 2.0

RESThub is all about **integrating and bundling frameworks with tools, best practices and documentation**. The RESThub team works everyday with those frameworks on high traffic, enterprise-grade applications for their customers.

That's why **we value developer experience** on those libraries and despise the "Not Invented Here" syndrome above all.

RESThub is a two-part web framework: you can use the JavaScript stack part with a Ruby-on-Rails or Node.js backend; or you could use the Java stack with an Angular.js frontend!

We strongly believe in Open Source Software, so the whole thing is available under the Apache License 2.0 on [Maven Central](http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cga%7C1%7Cg%3A%22org.resthub%22) and [Github](http://github.com/resthub/).

Roadmap

Expected new features for upcoming RESThub 2.1 are :

- Uprade to Spring 3.2

- Upgrade to Backbone.js 1.0

- Bean Validation + Backbone Validation plugin : do not duplicate your validation anymore on client side

- RESThub Identity manager : User/Group/Role webapp with Backbone.js GUI (alpha version available [here](https://github.com/resthub/resthub-identity))

- ElasticSearch integration

- Websocket support

- Improved Exception to HTTP response mapper (JSON/XML serialization of i18n aware messages)

- More examples applications

Contributions and feedbacks are welcomed !!!