This talk will introduce Brainstem, a new Rails library for easily presenting and versioning complex ActiveRecord model relationships through your JSON API. Allow your internal or external API consumers to eager-load model associations, request custom scopes and sorts, load multiple objects by ID simultaneously, and generate JSON that uses references instead of repeating data.
While your Brainstem API can be consumed by any JSON client, it will truly shine when using the included Backbone integration, adding relationship-aware models, centralized data loading, and a smart caching identity map to your Backbone applications.
All of this is designed to reduce network requests and simplify development of HTML5 applications, especially mobile ones. With Backbone + Brainstem, loading a hierarchy of objects from your server can be reduced to one line of code and one network request.
This talk will survey Brainstem usage in Rails, then dive into how it can enable rich mobile HTML5 applications.