In Node.js, you can dynamically "require()" any javascript file likewise to PHP's require. I'd like to use this in my client-side code just for ease of development but not actually call a javascript function, but have a compiler replace the line with the contents of the respective file; effectively concatenating the files, not one after another, but inline within the code of one of the files. The closest thing I have found to this is smash. Are there any compilers, minifiers, etc that can do this?
Browserify might not be exactly what you want but it does definitely help with the ease of development issue. When you use Browserify, your code is your build tool. Browserify gives you all the benefits of writing code in node (no anon functions to avoid globals, npm, simple requires, imports instead of namespaced globals) and it allows you to package that code to run on the client with one command and only load one file.
You can checkout my open source js framework Luc JS for an example. It runs on node and IE6. I'm able keep the code modular and build the single browser file with a one line command.
Related
I've recently been thrown in to clean up a project which has like 45-50 individual .js javascript files. I wonder what the best approach would be to decrease the loading size of them all. Just concatenate all files into one with npm or gulp? Install some module loader? webpack?
If you're already concatenating, minifying, and uglifying and you don't want all the files to be loaded on all the pages due to a monolithic bundle, you might be looking for something like Webpack's Commons Chunk Plugin.
This plugin walks down the tree of dependencies for each endpoint defined in your Webpack.config file and determines which modules are required across all pages. It then breaks the code into two bundles, a "common" bundle containing the modules that every page requires, which you must load with a script tag on each page:
<script src="commons.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
And an endpoint bundle for each individual page that you reference normally in a script tag placed after the commons script tag:
<script src="specificpage.bundle.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The result is that an individual page will not have to load modules that will only ever be used on other pages.
Again, this is a Webpack plugin. I don't know if this functionality is available as a Gulp plugin, because it must have knowledge of all endpoints in order to determine which dependencies are common to them all.
I redirect you to the very good https://github.com/thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist
In particular the following advises:
JavaScript Inline: High You don't have any JavaScript code inline
(mixed with your HTML code).
Concatenation: High JavaScript files
are concatenated.
Minification: High JavaScript files are minified (you can add the .min suffix).
You can accomplish this with a package manager such as gulp, grunt or webpack (for the most famous ones). You just need to choose what you prefer to use.
If you consider webpack, You can start with my very simple (but understanding) starter: https://github.com/dfa1234/snippets-starter
There's no much thing that you can do, basically is:
Concatenation - https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-concat
Minification - https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-minify
Instead of creating all those scripts, you can get something to re-use on yeoman, f.e. the Fountain, so it will reduce a lot of time just typing procedural code for doing the concatenation/minification.
Also if you can use some lazy load (like RequireJS or some frameworks have support to lazy load the module, like Angular) that will improve the performance of your aplication
EDIT:
If you want even more performance, you can install some compression tool in your server, for example this one for NodeJS https://www.npmjs.com/package/compression
I'm my personal opinion, if you have time, the best approach would be to read and understand the purpose of the project. Then plan a proper refactor. You are not fixing anything with concatenating, this is just a deployment step.
You should analyze which technologies are being used and if you want to maintain this code, in the long run, make a proper refactor into a much more modern stack, maybe you can take a seed project with ES6, webpack, Babel... and create a proper repository well maintained with proper modularity and dependencies resolution.
Once you have that, decreasing the load its just about adding proper tools in build time (babel, webpack, etc).
You would like to add some unit tests and continue working properly :)
It would be nice if one can run node.js code inside Excel user-defined functions. Something like using js code like VBA.
I googled for solutions but cannot find any. Is it possible to do this?
Yes, if you want to use packages from NPM. You could use webpack to combine all the stuff to one js file, it should work.
webpack as a static module bundler for modern JavaScript applications. When webpack processes your application, it internally builds a dependency graph which maps every module your project needs and generates one or more bundles. you could refers to this document.
You could also refer to a sample, Yeoman, the Yeoman generator creates a Node.js Office Add-in project. it use webpack combine all files into one js file.
I have written a self contained angular js module using browserify in order to make use of the commonJS/Node style syntax.
The module works fantastic when tested by itself, so I then use gulp to minify and host that on GitHub.
I've then imported that into another app that is also using browserify. When I run browserify it seems to try and rebrowserify the module and causes no end of problems.
I believe this is because the module requires angular and jquery and qtip2. So it's obviously trying to re parse these.
Is there a standard to not parse modules, or is there a way to exclude the browserifying of the modules? Or is it best to not include things like angular and jquery within your modules? I was trying to make them perfectly stand alone, maybe that's unwise?
Many thanks!
I would suggest providing both options, if it is important for you to have a standalone version that includes angular. This will provide people using your code with a total of three ways of using your code: Using the standalone version, the version that only includes the module, and cloning the repository directly and including the source files as part their build process.
I generally use the third option, but people who don't have build processes will likely prefer the first or second.
Is there any software that I can use to compile nodejs program?
The reason I want to compile nodejs code is to make it safely distributable.
For example for a desktop application,etc.
And also I want to know whether nodejs will execute faster if compiled as it is asynchronous already?
Javascript is not a compiled language and Node.js is Javascript. It will be executed and interpreted at runtime. You can process your javascript with tool like grunt.js for example lint-test and uglify it, but be careful so that do not break the npm system since it is based on certain conventions.
To package your javascript for distribution in the node.js context build an npm module.
https://www.npmjs.org/doc/developers.html
For distributing javascript to the desktop client: Remember it's Javascript an it need to be executed in the Javascript VM. So to have some UI you need to run it in the browser or you need to have some webkit compiled dll to run your code...
something like this...
http://www.tidesdk.org/
You can also use: http://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit (Thanks to #edi9999)
There is no way to do that with v8, it has only JIT option. It possible to make a "snapshot" with v8, but it's not exactly the same as compilation and node.js doesn't have support for this feature (also it might produce slower code). Also all your code will be available with toString() of functions.
You might be interested in JXcore project. It is a fork of node and as far as I know has some solution to code protection. Also one of the project goals is to develop javascript-to-LLVM compiler. Of course it can't have full support for ES specification (eval, new Function etc).
There's no way to 'compile' a nodejs program, as the javascript is interpreted at run time.
However, if you want to protect your code, you could maybe use something like Uglify JS to make the javascript less readable. However, this won't hinder people to change around your code.
The closest you might get to acheiving your goal is to create a self-executing Javascript bytecode wrapper.
A project that does this is pkg
It somehow creates a self-contained binary executable from Javascript, including module dependencies and asset files and produces a self-contained executable.
Installation and use is easy:
$ npm install -g pkg
$ pkg index.js -o my-program
$ ./my-program
It seems the resulting binary contains nodejs bytecode. It appears that you can cross-compile.
I have many JS files. Some of them depend on each other. Many of them depend on jQuery.
I need tool that can accept one file as parameter, fetch all its dependencies transitively and compile them into one file in proper order (based on dependencies)
Dependency information not always available inside files itself, so it would be nice to have it somewhere outside (xml file? folder structure?)
I've heard about Yahoo JS compiler, closure and so on, but I am not sure they do what I need.
Look: I have module "CustomerPage". It sould include "validation.js" and "gui.js". Both require jquery.js. And "gui.js" also requires "myFunctions.js".
I want some ant task or some script that would generate "CustomerPage.js" as result of all that files.
Tool should check dependency order, prevent double including and so on.
My project could have around 500 js files, how could I live with out of this tool?
People says "use GWT", but I need plain JS.
You might want to look at one of the AMD-style module loaders, such as RequireJS. Some of these can do what you want for precompiling, and can run in a development mode which makes it easier to debug by including all the files directly.