philsturgeon

Never Expose DB Results Directly

1. If you rename a field, then your users are fucked. Convert with a hardcoded array structure.
2. Most DB drivers [for PHP] will show integers as numeric strings and false as "0", so you want to typecast them.
3. Unless you're using an ORM with "hidden" functionality, people will see passwords, salts and all sorts of fancy codes. If you add one and forget to put it in your $hidden array then OOPS!

Use the URI sparingly, and correctly

1. Use the query string for paired params instead of /users/id/5/active/true. Your API does not need to be SEO optimised.
2. ?format=xml is stupid, use an Accept: application/xml header. I added this to the CodeIgniter Rest Server once for lazy people, and now people think it's a thing. It's not.

addyosmani

#Understanding MVC And MVP (For JavaScript & Backbone Developers)

Before exploring any JavaScript frameworks that assist in structuring applications, it can be useful to gain a basic understanding of architectural design patterns. Design patterns are proven solutions to common development problems and can suggest structural paradigms to help guide us in adding some organization to our application.

I think patterns are exciting as they're effectively a grass roots effort that build upon the collective experience of skilled developers who have previously faced similar problems as we do now. Although developers 10 or 20 years ago may not have been using the same programming languages for implementing patterns, there are many lessons we can learn from their efforts.

In this section, we're going to review two popular patterns - MVC and MVP. The context of our exploration will be how these patterns are related to the popular JavaScript framework Backbone.js, which will be explored in greater detail later on.