spine/spine

Spine is a small JavaScript library for building web applications that have a lot of interactive behavior in the browser. It follows an MVC structure, which stands for Model-View-Controller, a pattern for organising code so that the data, the display, and the logic for handling user actions are kept separate. Spine is intended to provide that structure with as little overhead as possible, letting developers focus on the application itself rather than the framework. The library is written in CoffeeScript, which is a language that compiles down to JavaScript. You do not need to use CoffeeScript to build an application with Spine, but the documentation and companion tools are written with CoffeeScript users in mind. Spine distributes compiled JavaScript files so it can be used from plain JavaScript as well. One of the points the README emphasises is that Spine is very small: the core is under 700 lines of code, written to be readable rather than terse. The intention is that a developer can read through the entire source and understand how it works within a few days, which the authors argue is a significant advantage over larger frameworks where the internals are too complex to fully grasp. The project is primarily documented at its external website, spinejs.com. The test suite is written with Jasmine and can be run in a browser by opening the included test file, or with Node.js from the command line. Contributions are accepted as pull requests to the dev branch on GitHub. Code contributions should be submitted in CoffeeScript. The repository shows limited recent activity based on the tools and references in the README. It reflects an era of JavaScript development before current frameworks became dominant.