Okay, I've looked and looked and don't quite see a question that looks like mine, nor a project that quite addresses my need. This is probably because I'm doing something insane, and I am also asking for something difficult. But I wanted to see what others think.
I'm building my first large-scale single-page application. The way I've set it up is by breaking it up into a number of NPM modules. I like this because NPM provides a nice environment to build purely node-run unit tests in, a way to reuse some of my code for other projects we do at my company, and a forced separation of concerns. Here's the general idea:
- A core data model library
- A core UI library
- A psuedo-library that provides individual UI components based on the above two…</li>
- …another of those…</li>
- …etc for each sub-application of my application
- A very small central project that pulls all the components provided by the above together into an interface as necessary
This means a lot of libraries, and a number of dependencies that are common (Underscore, moment, EventEmitter2, etc).
Now I need to figure out how to get all that code into a browser. Ideally, I'd want something with some browserify characteristics (rolls modules and dependencies together into single files to cut down on resource callbacks), but has some of requirejs's asynchronous loading DNA (I'd rather not have to load my entire application up front; being able to call down chunks when the user navigates is useful).
I'm having trouble reconciling the above, though. I get what Require is trying to do, but every time I try to use it for already-built NPM modules (not AMD modules, though I'm happy to write that central project in an AMD-ish way) I get really confused and the sense that it's not really meant for me. For a single page application it seems like it's just going to resolve everything into one file anyway, since my dynamic resources are whole dependencies rather than individual files? And of course, Browserify is made with the sole intent of Hulk Smashing all your code into a single file. I could bundle each NPM module separately with Browserify, but then I'm duplicating the common dependencies for each.
I've looked at a bunch of other projects and they all seem to be addressing the client side more than the bundling side. What am I missing here?
[In pipe dream mode, I also like inject, partly because it's written by LinkedIn (who have a good reputation in my mind), but also for its localStorage caching.]