Developing Backbone.js Applications

Chapter 8. Modular Development

When we say an application is modular, we generally mean it’s composed of a set of highly decoupled, distinct pieces of functionality stored in modules. As you probably know, loose coupling facilitates easier maintainability of apps by removing dependencies where possible. When this is implemented efficiently, it’s quite easy to see how changes to one part of a system may affect another.

Unlike some more traditional programming languages, the current iteration of JavaScript (ECMA-262) doesn’t provide developers with the means to import such modules of code in a clean, organized manner.

Instead, developers are left to fall back on variations of the module or object literal patterns combined with <script> tags or a script loader. With many of these, module scripts are strung together in the DOM with namespaces being described by a single global object where it’s still possible to have name collisions. There’s also no clean way to handle dependency management without some manual effort or third-party tools.

Whilst native solutions to these problems may be arriving via the ES6 (the next version of the official JavaScript specification) modules proposal, the good news is that writing modular JavaScript has never been easier and you can start doing it today.

In this next part of the book, we’re going to look at how to use AMD (asynchronous module definition) modules and RequireJS to cleanly wrap units of code in your application into manageable modules. We’ll ...