Big Bird

Big Bird is a JavaScript framework of sorts that's designed to help you write more maintainable, modular JavaScript. It fits perfectly when you don't need a full blown MVC framework like Backbone or Ember. Big Bird is suited to situations where you are rendering on the server-side but need to progressively enhance your application with a sprinkling of JS magic and you're fed up with writing monolithic jQuery functions that are difficult to maintain.

Getting started

We have an example carousel written with Big Bird to give you a good starting point. It's heavily commented to show you some of the functionality of Big Bird.

The source code is also heavily commented, and there are a full suite of tests which help to illustrate the functionality provided.

Using Big Bird with Browserify

If you're using Browserify and you need an older jQuery than version 2.1, you'll have to shim it:

npm install --save bigbird

If you're using browserify-shim add the following to your package.json:

"browser": {
  "jquery": "path_to_your_javascripts/jquery.js"
},
"browserify-shim": {
  "jquery": {
    "exports": "$"
  }
}

Change log

0.3.5

• Add proper UMD support
• Register on NPM

0.3.4

• Add CommonJS module support
• Refactor codebase

0.3.3

• setElements now uses this.$el to search for data-bb-el elements
• this.$els and this.els are now functions that accept a name and an optional force parameter to re-cache the element

0.3.2

• Added setElements method to dynamically assign data-bb-el="blah" elements in a template into a this.$els object

0.3.0

• Added underscore and eventable as dependencies
• Removed tiny pub sub in favour of eventable

0.2.0

• Tidied up initializer
• More compatible with other DOM libraries (although still relies on Tiny Pub Sub)
• Bower registered

0.1.1

• Refactoring controllers and views into one class called Module.
• Added new destroy() method for tearing down views to unbind events.
• Added a carousel example to help people get started.
• Heavily commented the source code.

0.1.0

• Initial release

Contributing

Big Bird is built with grunt. Please make sure you have npm installed to get up and running.

1. Fork it, pull it down.
2. Run npm install to get the grunt modules required.
3. Make changes to the src/bigbird.js file.
4. Run the tests and build the source using the grunt && grunt jasmine tasks
5. Open a pull request, make sure the tests pass.

Big Bird is maintained by cjbell88, callum and ninjabiscuit.

License

Big Bird is released under the MIT license:

www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT