Support for requirejs compatible builds through npm

[msmyers]

[rodneyrehm]

thank you! Is this following up on #310?

What do you think of piping this through umd?

[msmyers]

I don't understand your question. I've never used UMD.

I forked and patched the project so I could use it in my requirejs setup.

[msmyers]

I'm new to the javascript/node/requirejs community. If you have suggestions on how to improve the build, I will gladly do the work, in order to learn.

[msmyers]

Yes, it resolves https://github.com/medialize/URI.js/issues/310

[rodneyrehm]

I'm new to the javascript/node/requirejs community.

welcome :)

If you have suggestions on how to improve the build, I will gladly do the work, in order to learn.

I'll do my best to explain…

I've never used UMD.

UMD (Universal Module Definition) is a way to make modules compatible with AMD (what RequireJS uses), CommonJS (what Node uses) and globals (what you'd have in the browser using <script> elemenets, i.e. no module management).

The URI.js source is wrapped in UMD so everyone can use the code in whatever situation they happen to be in.

Your commit 047b363 makes the RequireJS Optimizer consume the UMD source and produce a file that does can't be loaded by RequireJS, as the following prints undefined:

require(['dist/urijs-1.18.1.min'], function(URI) {
  console.log(URI);
});

Also the RequireJS Optimizer does not remove the UMD wrappers of the individual files, so loading the dist file in node will complain about not being able to load ./punycode if you run

node -e 'var URI = require("./dist/urijs-1.18.1.min"); console.log("URI", URI);'

And if you load the file in a browser using <script src="dist/urijs-1.18.1.min.js"></script>, you'll find the globals URI, SecondLevelDomain, punycode and IPv6.

In other words, the Require Optimizer doesn't solve the problem.

But which problem is that anyway? If you are using a module loader, you can load src/URI.js and have your tool-chains optimizer (be that RequireJS, Browserify, Webpack, …) take care of the rest - there's no need to load minified/bundled sources, when you're going to run everything through your own build-pipeline again. You can load src/URI.js in Node as there's no need to optimize anything here. And for using <script> in the browser you can load src/URI.min.js, which exposes the modules as globals.