http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:simple_modules

Regards

I certainly hope that TC39 gives us native module support in ECMAScript Harmony. With bult-in syntax, we can have modules that load simply and have synchronous imports that don’t block the browser.

In my view, no one should have to write a transport format and there are plenty of ways to load modules that provide correct line numbers, good performance, etc.

I have always been in favor of a common transport format, but never in favor of authoring in that style.

Kevin

That said, like James Burke I’ve been working on a client side module loader (think we started at the same time but his was a lot simpler). After seeing his API I simplified mine as well and read the CommonJS specs.

There’s a ‘module’ namespace there which could be used to define modules rather then just hold some data.

module(function(exp, req){ /* code */ });

Here’s my client side version of it (still beta) http://github.com/bgerrissen/modulejs

It uses fn.toString() so it can be parsed looking for what to ‘require’, loads that first and then fires the fn passed to ‘module();’. The parser I wrote is currently quite simplistic and should be expanded to something more elaborate, but the proof of concept is on the table. James Burke came up with require.def(); which is similar but passing the require strings is made mandatory.

It also seems both James Burke and me came up with a .run() method about the same time (I used it for JSoo) and not sure why he abandoned it, but it’s a great way to kickstart modules into life.

module.run(’myApp’); // load myApp.js, it’s dependencies and run it.

Explicit code invocation should really be a feature of CommonJS as well and when looking at this in depth could make require in Ryan Dahl’s NodeJS async as well.

Here is an example of a CommonJS module that is used on both the client and the server of my CouchApp Twitter client. (This is app-specific code, but I also tend to use Mustache.js in CommonJS form on both the client and in CouchDB show and list functions.)

Module:
http://github.com/jchris/twebz/blob/master/lib/twebz.js

In the Node.js async job handler:
http://github.com/jchris/twebz/blob/master/node/twebzbot.js#L23

In the browser:
http://github.com/jchris/twebz/blob/master/evently/profile/profileReady/selectors/div.controls/setup_user.js#L5

The CouchApp CommonJS runtime is interesting because it preloads all the application code when the page is launched, from the CouchDB design document. Then the require function can be used to selectively load modules.

I’ve definitely gotten addicted to the peace of mind that comes from knowing that requiring a module won’t effect my other code, or litter the window object with new references.