I think much of this is due to Spine being designed for CoffeeScript, and the article only uses the Javascript notation. Be sure to look at the documentation h

I think much of this is due to Spine being designed for CoffeeScript, and the article only uses the Javascript notation. Be sure to look at the documentation http://spinejs.com/docs/models http://spinejs.com/docs/models and toggle between the Javascript and CoffeeScript versions of the code samples.