Book Image

Modular Programming with JavaScript

Book Image

Modular Programming with JavaScript

Overview of this book

Programming in the modular manner is always encouraged for bigger systems—it is easier to achieve scalability with modular programming. Even JavaScript developers are now interested in building programs in a modular pattern. Modules help people who aren’t yet familiar with code to find what they are looking for and also makes it easier for programmers to keep things that are related close together. Designing and implementing applications in a modular manner is highly encouraged and desirable in both simple and enterprise level applications. This book covers some real-life examples of modules and how we can translate that into our world of programming and application design. After getting an overview of JavaScript object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts and their practical usage, you should be able to write your own object definitions using the module pattern. You will then learn to design and augment modules and will explore the concepts of cloning, inheritance, sub-modules, and code extensibility. You will also learn about SandBoxing, application design, and architecture based on modular design concepts. Become familiar with AMD and CommonJS utilities. By the end of the book, you will be able to build spectacular modular applications in JavaScript.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Modular Programming with JavaScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
2
Review of Important JavaScript OOP Concepts
Index

CommonJS


As with AMD format, CommonJS (also known as CJS) is another format which defines JavaScript modules as objects that can be made available to any dependent code. CJS modules can only define objects, as opposed to AMD modules, which can define constructors and functions too.

Unlike AMD format, which takes a browser-first approach, CommonJS takes a server-first approach. It also covers a broader set of concerns which are server-related, such as io, file system, and alike.

Many developers (I'm one of them) use AMD format for browser-targeted modules and CommonJS for server-side targeted modules. However, you could use CJS format for browser modules as well.

Some of the tools that support CJS for the browsers are:

Let's have a look at a simple example to see how we can implement a CJS format module.

Implementing a CommonJS module

Imagine that we have a file called moduleOne.js. From inside this file, we can export...