Little A is a front-end engineer of a startup team and is responsible for writing the project's Javascript program.
Global variable conflict
Based on his own experience, Xiao A first extracted some commonly used functions, wrote them as functions and put them in a public file base.js:
Little C is a colleague of Little A. He reported to Little A: His page has introduced a class library called underscore.js, and this class library will also occupy the _ global variable, so it will follow _ in base.js conflicts. Little A thought to himself that underscore.js is a third-party library and it is probably difficult to change, but base.js has been deployed on many pages and it is impossible to change it. In the end, Little A had no choice but to change the global variables occupied by underscore.js.
At this time, Little A discovered that placing all functions in a name space can reduce the probability of global variable conflicts, but it does not solve the problem of global variable conflicts.
Dependency
With the development of business, Xiao A has written a series of function libraries and UI components, such as the tab switching component tabs.js. This component needs to call functions in base.js and util.js.
One day, new colleagues Xiao D and Xiao A reported that they had referenced tabs.js in the page, but the function was not normal. Little A discovered the problem at first glance. It turned out that Little D did not know that tabs.js depends on base.js and util.js, and he did not add references to these two files. So, he immediately made changes:
Little A thought to himself that as the author, he naturally knows the dependencies of components, but it is difficult for others to tell, especially newcomers.
After some time, Xiao A added a function to the tab switching component. In order to realize this function, tabs.js also needs to call the function in ui.js. At this time, Little A discovered a serious problem. He needed to add references to ui.js on all pages that called tabs.js! ! !
After some time, Xiao A optimized tabs.js. This component no longer depends on util.js, so he removed the references to util.js in all pages that use tabs.js. Improve performance. His modification caused a big problem. The test team MM told him that some pages were abnormal. Little A took a look and suddenly realized that other functions of some pages used functions in util.js. He removed the reference to this file and an error occurred. To ensure normal functionality, he restored the code.
Little A thought again, is there a way to modify dependencies without modifying the pages one by one, without affecting other functions?
Modular
When Little A was browsing the Internet, he accidentally discovered a novel modular coding method that could solve all the problems he had encountered before.
In modular programming, each file is a module. Each module is created by a function called define. For example, after transforming base.js into a module, the code will become like this:
How to call the interface provided by a certain module? Take tabs.js as an example, it depends on base.js and util.js:
Due to the lack of native browser support, if we want to code in a modular manner, we must use something called a loader.
There are currently many implementations of loaders, such as require.js and seajs. The JRaiser class library also has its own loader.