Weepy,
Thanks for working on this & for open-sourcing it!
When I first started working with node, I searched for this kind of thing &
landed on brequire as a way to reduce boilerplate on files that I wanted to
use in the browser as well as from node. It worked well for me and eased my
transition to working with node. After that I tried browserify and after
that I went back to writing the boilerplate on every file (by boilerplate,
I mean lines like "var _ = root._ || require('underscore');" at the top of
the file and "if (typeof require == 'undefined') // assign to a global else
use exports" at the bottom) -- the kind of boilerplate that you find in
libraries designed to work in both environments, like backbone, underscore
and async.
The three methods have their pros and cons. Browserify shines when you need
to make node libraries (that you have no control over) work in the browser
(things like Request, EventEmitter, util.inherits, etc -- they all "just
work"). But the way that it puts all the JS into a single file makes
debugging cumbersome if you're debugging more than just one of the files
(the main file isn't so bad b/c the line numbers match, but if you end up
debugging any of the dependencies, it gets awkward).
Brequire is nicer for debugging because it doesn't bundle everything into a
single file, but it doesn't do all the magic that browserify does on
3rd-party files, so it's best for when you're authoring the JS yourself and
not using a lot of node-specific dependencies. It is especially helpful if
you're writing lots of small files in the same module (since this would
otherwise mean a lot of boilerplate and since it's just one large module,
it's not a big deal to require Brequire).
Just including the boilerplate in each file is (IMO) a better approach when
you're splitting your work into lots of small-and-sharp single-purpose
modules and trying to encourage their use independent of the larger project
(fewer dependencies = easier/higher adoption). I also tend to use fewer,
larger files (one file per namespace instead of one file per class), like
Backbone, Underscore and the core node modules, which reduces the pain of
the boilerplate.
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