Bundling JavaScript is needed to transport Node.js modules from server to browser. This chapter shows some examples on how to bundle JavaScript for usage in a web browser.
The importance of learning to bundle JavaScript can be seen from looking at modules at the npm repository. In modules from npmjs, you will often see a statement similar to:
module.exports = someFunction;
This means someFunction can be called from other places in a program. After reading this chapter, you should get a feeling for re-using code from npmjs.org.
As a practical example, and as foundation for other chapters, you will see different approaches to load the Backbone.js library as module.
You can load Backbone as module from npm and package it for the browser with browserify. You can check that everything works correctly, with a static file server:
$ npm install super-static
$ ss .
Server started on port 3474
127.0.0.1 - - [Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:17:32 GMT] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 253 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36"
127.0.0.1 - - [Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:17:32 GMT] "GET /static/bundle.js HTTP/1.1" 200 - "http://localhost:3474/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.112 Safari/537.36"
127.0.0.1 - - [Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:17:34 GMT] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/5