Amdee

Overview

Amdee is a command-line tool for converting Node style packages into client-side scripts that cooperates with requireJS.

Amdee by default works with the boundary of the package; i.e. each package is converted into its own AMD script.

This approach has the following advantage

• Respect the scope of the package - no need to worry about conflicting names across packages
• Leveraging CDN for popular reusable packages - for scripts such as jQuery or Underscore, you will not end up including them in your script

Amdee by default provides many NodeJS module shims for client-side as well.

Amdee will convert a script, along with its relative dependencies within a package, into a single javascript file. All of the relative dependencies will be resolved to pure javascript variable, i.e.,

// main
var Foo = require('./foo');

will be compiled into something equivalent to the following

// foo_module

var foo_module = (function () { /* foo module definition */ })();

// main_module
var main_module = (function() {
  var Foo = foo_module; // require is parsed out from above
}); 

External modules will be left along and loaded as separate scripts via AMD mechanism. For exmaple:

// require jQuery
var $ = require('jquery'); // this is an external module.

Will be compiled as following

define(['jquery'], function(require, exports, module) {

    var $ = require('jquery');
}

And then you can setup the shim for requireJS as following:

require.config({
    "path": {
        "jquery": "http://..."
    }, 
    "shim": {
        "jquery": {
            "deps": [],
            "exports": "jQuery"
        }
    }
}); 

The config object for requireJS can be passed into the requirejs attribute of the amdee.run function, which is further described below.

Installation

$ npm install -g amdee

Usage

On Command line:

$ amdee --source <module_file> --target <output_file> [--recursive] [--watch]

In Node program (below is written in coffee-script with expressjs)

express = require 'express'
amdee = require 'amdee'
app = express()

app.configure ->
  # ...
  amdee.run
    source: './client/main.coffee'
    target: './public/js/main.js'
    requirejs: # add requireJS's config here; will be written to main.js
      paths:
        jquery: 'https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min'
        'jquery.livequery': 'https://raw.github.com/brandonaaron/livequery/master/jquery.livequery'
        'jquery.address': 'https://raw.github.com/bzlib/jquery-address/master/src/jquery.address'
      shim:
        jquery:
          deps: []
          exports: 'jQuery'
        'jquery.livequery': ['jquery']
        'jquery.address': ['jquery']

Ensure your main.coffee to include the needed dependencies the usual way.

$ = require 'jquery'
require 'jquery.address' # plugin does not return object
require 'jquery.livequery'

# add relative dependencies within the module

# ... your code ...

Any relative dependencies will be resolved into the same file, whereas the external dependencies will be loaded as separate scripts.

License

Amdee is released under MIT License.

Node Core Modules

• Buffer - not available in browser
• child_process - not available
• cluster - not available in browser
• crypto - not available
• dns - not available
• domain - not available
• EventEmitter - available
• fs - not available
• globals
  • process - might not make sense
  • console - certainly needed
  • require - yes definitely needed
  • __filename
  • __dirname
  • module
  • exports
  • setTimeout
  • clearTimeout
  • setInterval
  • clearInterval
• http - not sure if make sense, but partial request & response do
• https - same thing
• net - same thing
• os - might not make sense either.
• path - some of the capabilities make sense; but not sure all of it...
• process - not sure...
• punycode - don't even know what this does...
• querstring - available
• readline - not available
• console - yes
• stream - not available
• string_decoder - not available
• ssl - not available
• udp - not available
• url - yes
• util - yes
• vm - not avialable
• zlib - not available