This is a sample application presenting integration of Backbone.js with Spring Framework 31. This application wasn't intended to provide fully-fledged TODO list. It's goal was to present some new features introduced in Spring 3.1 and integration with Backbone.js.

Features that this sample covers:

• Java-based configuration (Servlet 3.0 based web-application and persistence layer backed by JPA and Spring Data JPA)
• Request body validation and exception handling
• Improvements in RESTful web services (produces and consumes).

The application is Servlet 3.0 standard application, so it need to be deployed to Servlet 3.0 compatible environment (Application was tested on Tomcat 7).

The application needs to be deployed as context root. This application serves static content (like CSS, JS files) from static index.html file therefore it doesn't dynamically update URL's for static content. Also Backbone's models and collections needs to have url property to be set and the todo-list.js file is also static. That's why for this particular application URL's for static content and API calls were hardcoded for application running as context-root ('/').

If you do not want to run this application as context-root you need to change URL's to static content in index.html file and you need to change url property for Backbone's API calls for Task model and Tasks collection in todo-list.js file.

Whenever you encounter any problems with this application (or any other Backbone application) open browser's JS console and verify there is no JS errors. Also check if everything - HTML page, static CSS and JS file - were correctly downloaded and you do not receiving 404 for any of these resource. You can check this in Network/Net tab in Chrome or Firebug.

If everything seems to be loaded and no JS console doesn't show any errors you should be able to create Backbone models or collections in the console. For example you can try the following:

> task = new Task({description: 'Desc'})
child
> task.get('description')
"Desc"

Whenever something goes wrong on the page go to the console and watch for JS error.

In general it is very good idea to get familiar with your browser's JS console while you will use it a lot for debugging.