[204NoContent]

Thanks for the insight. When I first started coding the tutorial I was really trying to minimize line count. I had originally wanted to write a post that said something like "Backbone only takes you 10 more lines of code", because that was what my gut was telling me. But when it became clear that I was not going to be able to get close to the same line count without doing exceptionally weird things, I thought better of it and coded the app like I normally would.

Your point is totally valid about some of the extra stuff I did. The one thing that irked me is that I added some lines because I didn't like the data structure, like the stuff in your example. In real life I would go change the data, but I felt like that might be slippery slope. For example if I changed the data for the phones show view I could have just done a loop over a 10 line template instead of the ridiculously long ~100 line template (although the Angular peeps could have also done the same thing).

In the end I decided to stick with the data provided by Angular and just massage it when necessary. It increased the line count and added complexity, but it made it feel like a Backbone app to me.