Schinckel.net

I really like KnockoutJS. I’ve said that lots of times, but I mean it. It does one thing, two-way bindings between a data model and the GUI elements, really well.

Perhaps my biggest hesitation in using it in a big project is that there is no built-in persistence layer. This would appear to be a situation where something like Backbone has an advantage.

And then, last week, I came across Simperium.

“So,” I thought, “what if you were able to transparently persist KnockoutJS models using Simperium?”

// Assume we have a SIMPERIUM_APP_ID, and a logged in user's access_token.
var simperium = new Simperium(SIMPERIUM_APP_ID, {token: access_token});
// mappingOptions is a ko.mapping mappingOptions object: really only useful
// if your bucket contains homogenous objects.
var store = new BucketMapping(simperium.bucket(BUCKET_NAME), mappingOptions);

var tony = store.all()[0];

var alan = store.create({
  name: "Alan Tenari",
  date_of_birth: "1965-02-06",
  email: "alan.tenari@example.com"
});

Now, tony is an existing object we loaded up from the server, and alan is one we just created.

Both of these objects are mapped using ko.mapping, but, this is the exciting bit, every time we make a change to any of their attributes, they are automatically persisted back to simperium.

There is a little more to it than that: we may want to only persist valid objects, for instance.

This totally gets me excited. And, I’ve already written a big chunk of the code that actually does this!

But for that, you’ll just have to wait…