I have been reading a few tutorials on HTML5’s canvas tag, and decided to give it a whirl. Rather than bunch everything together in a huge javascript file, like most of the examples I read, I wanted to split files into sensible chunks of code. The RequireJS project has crossed my path on more than one occasion, so I figured it might be a good thing to try. I figured correctly, as it was super easy to set up, and works swimmingly.

There are plenty of great resources out there to learn all about modular javascript, as well as an interesting debate on the proper method of defining modules, but the RequireJS site itself has enough info to get a basic project off the ground. I had to do a bit of experimenting on my own to clear things up in my head, and thought I would post the results here.

The project basically draws a canvas that takes up the entire browser window (and redraws itself when the window is resized). A white dot is drawn on the screen and floats towards the bottom-right corner until the user swipes a finger (using a mobile device) or the mouse pointer (on a lap/desktop). The dot will switch directions to match the swipe. Try it out!. I had intended to get the dot to do more interesting things, but time gets away from me.

The folder structure holds three files in the root, and the rest of the folder structure looks like this:

Click here for full source

Notice that the only file in the root is index.html. Also notice that the only javascript file referenced in index.html is src/require.js, which has a data-main attribute stuck in there, as well. That data-main attribute references the entry point to the application. RequireJS will automatically append ‘.js’ to the filename, and will run whatever is in that file.

At the top of catToy.js is the following code:

This bit of code tells RequireJS what’s what. The baseUrl is a relative filepath that will act as the root for all other file paths referenced in the config block. The paths object is a list of aliases (shortcuts) to other subdirectories that contain code. The key (lib) is the alias name, and the value (‘../assets/lib’) is the file path relative to the baseUrl.

The shim object allows you to define modules that originally weren’t intended to be used with RequireJS. In this case, the Hammer library is referenced, and will export a ‘Hammer’ module that can be used in the project.

Underneath the config block is a function that acts as the main starting point of the application. The first two lines are the most important, in terms of RequireJS.

This is basically a function call that says, “Hey, RequireJS!, do this! And don’t forget to load these three modules before you do it!”

The three modules in question are Stage, Mover, and Vector2D. The first parameter of the requirejs() function is an array of modules that are needed in the function that is passed in as the second parameter. RequireJS will look up the modules, and pass them into the anonymous function, using whatever names you define.

Each of the modules used here are set up to be specifically compatible with RequireJS using a function called define(). The first line of each module is very similar to that of catToy.js:

Yeah, that’s it. Just wrap your code in the define() function and it can be used as a RequireJS module. If the module needs to use code from another module, then pass in an array of module names, just like before.