How journalists can use Backbone to create data-driven projects

POYNTER – By Erik Hinton

Single page apps are great solutions for data journalism. By offloading the complexity from backends and servers, journalists can build rich programs and graphics out of just Javascript, HTML and CSS. In fact, these “backends” can shrink to a vanishing point. We can use Twitter in place of a database. Or we can get even simpler and store (static) data in JS/JSON/XML files.

We can make news apps without having to touch a server or write any Ruby, Python or PHP. This is important. It allows data journalists to focus on developing their stories instead of configuring servers. The time and effort to launch an interactive application is reduced to the point where it becomes feasible for journalistic outlets of all sizes to make applications for both long-term pieces and breaking news.

Using JavaScript frameworks to manage one-page apps

There is something of a disconnect between traditional software development models and those of deadline-driven news. In a more server-side oriented development scheme, we would write a program on our computers, set up a server somewhere, configure it to run the app, transfer the data to some database on the server, make sure it can handle the load of a lot of people looking at it and then finally release it. In the newsroom, we have limited time. [Read more…]