When to use more than one Sammy.js application?

Question

As I'm learning about Sammy.js I read that you can have several Sammy.js applications in the same page, each bound to a different element (i.e. div). I would like to understand why would this be useful.

I read in another post that only forms inside a bound element will trigger the route change, I'm thinking this could be used to modularize your application. Is there another use case beside this? Could you provide an example of how to modularize your application in this way?

Answer 1

We implemented a component similar to Sammy in our Silverlight application some time ago. The similarity is in that both represent a kind of a simple browser that can be bound to a UI region. The approach gave us several benefits:

1. We had an extensible way to add new content implementations. I mean that we could add plugins to our app that contained new forms/views which the application core had no knowledge about.
2. We could easily implement composite views, e.g. dashboard that were able to show any view implemented in any module. Including themselves. (A-ha, we had created recursive dashboards that worked until the app hit the memory limit. Kind of Inception. :))

Sammy can be used to reach these goals as well.

However, you must understand that from all Sammy applications running on a page, only one can be bound to the browser location bar. Others will have their location visible only to javascript, or you'll need to render location bars for them on the page.