JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Modules

An important reason to organize code into classes is to make that code more modular and suitable for reuse in a variety of situations. Classes are not the only kind of modular code, however. Typically, a module is a single file of JavaScript code. A module file might contain a class definition, a set of related classes, a library of utility functions, or just a script of code to execute. Any chunk of JavaScript code can be a module, as long as it is written in a modular way. JavaScript does not define any language constructs for working with modules (it does reserve the keywords import and export, however, so future versions of the language might), which means that writing modular JavaScript is largely a matter of following certain coding conventions.

Many JavaScript libraries and client-side programming frameworks include some kind of module system. Both the Dojo toolkit and Google’s Closure library, for example, define provide() and require() functions for declaring and loading modules. And the CommonJS server-side JavaScript standardization effort (see http://commonjs.org) has created a modules specification that also uses a require() function. Module systems like this often handle module loading and dependency management for you and are beyond the scope of this discussion. If you use one of these frameworks, then you should use and define modules following the conventions appropriate to that framework. In this section we’ll discuss very simple module conventions.

The goal ...