Meta Issue: Architecture of the main application JavaScript

[chipcullen]

One aspect of this that has the most questions marks for me is how to architect the JavaScript. Organizing JS is something that I'm not terribly advanced at - my JS work so far tends to be piles of simple functions. I don't have a preferred design pattern, or any real rhyme or reason to what I do.

Objectives:

• Modular - able to rip apart one element without impacting others
• Easy to maintain the parts that need maintaining - if I need to make a hand done curation list, for instance
• Dependencies? Would something like Require.js make sense? Is that overkill? What about simple concatenation?