Thanks! RE: Nested collections, we ended up playing around with Backbone relational as an extension to backbone ( https://github.com/PaulUithol/Backbone-relational) to deal with nested and multi relational collections. In short, whenever faced with a more complex relation, we took the easiest path possible which was normally a matter of creating another collection relating two entities. As far as client side persistence, we did not address that. Its on our backlog, but for right now we are just relying on our API to serve up the right subset of data with every call.