Over the years there’s been a steadily increasing ecosystem of JavaScript components to choose from. The sheer amount of choices is fantastic, but this also infamously presents a difficulty when components are mixed-and-matched. And it doesn’t take too long for budding developers to find out that not all components are built to play nicely together.
To address these issues, the competing module specs AMD and CommonJS have appeared on the scene, allowing developers to write their code in an agreed-upon sandboxed and modularized way, so as not to “pollute the ecosystem”.
Asynchronous module definition (AMD)
Asynchronous module definition (AMD) is a specification for the programming language JavaScript. It defines an application programming interface (API) that defines code modules and their dependencies, and loads them asynchronously if desired. Implementations of AMD provide the following benefits:
To address these issues, the competing module specs AMD and CommonJS have appeared on the scene, allowing developers to write their code in an agreed-upon sandboxed and modularized way, so as not to “pollute the ecosystem”.
Asynchronous module definition (AMD)
Asynchronous module definition (AMD) is a specification for the programming language JavaScript. It defines an application programming interface (API) that defines code modules and their dependencies, and loads them asynchronously if desired. Implementations of AMD provide the following benefits:
- Website performance improvements. AMD implementations load smaller JavaScript files, and then only when they are needed.
- Fewer page errors. AMD implementations allow developers to define dependencies that must load before a module is executed, so the module does not try to use outside code that is not available yet.
In addition to loading multiple JavaScript files at runtime, AMD implementations allow developers to encapsulate code in smaller, more logically-organized files, in a way similar to other programming languages such as Java. For production and deployment, developers can concatenate and minify JavaScript modules based on an AMD API into one file, the same as traditional JavaScript.
CommonJS
CommonJS is a style you may be familiar with if you’re written anything in Node (which uses a slight variant). It’s also been gaining traction on the frontend with Browserify.
Universal Module Definition (UMD)
Since CommonJS and AMD styles have both been equally popular, it seems there’s yet no consensus. This has brought about the push for a “universal” pattern that supports both styles, which brings us to none other than the Universal Module Definition.
The pattern is admittedly ugly, but is both AMD and CommonJS compatible, as well as supporting the old-style “global” variable definition.
CommonJS
CommonJS is a style you may be familiar with if you’re written anything in Node (which uses a slight variant). It’s also been gaining traction on the frontend with Browserify.
Universal Module Definition (UMD)
Since CommonJS and AMD styles have both been equally popular, it seems there’s yet no consensus. This has brought about the push for a “universal” pattern that supports both styles, which brings us to none other than the Universal Module Definition.
The pattern is admittedly ugly, but is both AMD and CommonJS compatible, as well as supporting the old-style “global” variable definition.
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