Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Universal Module Definition

UMD, or Universal Module Definition, is a module definition format that aims to be compatible with both CommonJS and AMD. It also allows you to export the module as a global variable that you can include in your application through a simple <script> tag.

It does this by wrapping the modules in a boilerplate that checks the environment to detect how the module is used, and produces the correct exported object.

For example, the preceding greeter example would look like this with UMD:

// greeter.js(function (root, factory) {  // Requirements are defined here}(this, function () {  function helloWorld(name) {    process.stdout.write(`hello ${name}!\n`  };  // Whatever you return is exposed  return {    helloWorld: helloWorld