amdLoader

Another implementation of the CommonJS Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) specification.

Why another?

There are a quite a few implementations out there already (for example RequireJS, almond and curl.js).

The implementations that I have seen tend to be monolithic, hard to extend and inflexible. For example: require.js crashes when loading a file if require.js is active (eg. a script that calls define() anonymously).

Features

This loader supports:

• Loading named & anonymous modules
• Loading external resources
• Loading non-AMD resources
• Loader plugins
• Usage of globals, packages and predefined paths
• Normalization of relative paths

Building

The source can be found in amdLoader/src. A ready-made combined file that includes all functionality is available in amdLoader/dist.

If you want to build the files yourself, make sure to install the dependencies using npm install first. Then run npm build to update the build files located in amdLoader/dist.

If you're working on the source files, run npm start to watch the source files and build them automatically after changing one of the source files.

Tests

The unit tests depend on the following packages:

$ npm install -g tape
$ npm install -g browserifyy
$ npm install -g testling
$ npm install -g phantomjs
$ npm install -g faucet

tape is a tap-producing test harness for node and browsers. Pipe it through faucet to make its output friendly to read. browserify, testling, and phantomjs are needed to run the tests in a headless browser environment.

To run the tests:

# Test a single file using tape
$ tape normalizeId.js | faucet

# Test all files using testling
$ browserify *.js | testling | faucet

Source files

amdLoader is made up of several files, of which the following:

file	description
define.js	core functionality (eg. require and define methods)
loader.js	responsible for inserting and loading modules on demand
normalizeId.js	responsible for (module) id normalization
normalizeResource.js	responsible for (sub) resource normalization
path.js	responsible for resolving (relative) paths
registry.js	responsible for registering and resolving dependencies for loaded modules
globals.js	allows registration of globals