Well put. My (and, I think others) concern with the article is that it advocates splitting all your code into separate files (great for maintainability and managing your code base), but then loading each of them individually on demand (probably a bad idea for all the reasons everyone's mentioned). I'm a lead dev on a fairly large JavaScript app, and we've taken that middle route - we use build process with Grunt and RequireJS to compile our 300+ individual script files into a handful of concatenated files divvied up by page/component. Our application is large enough that loading everything at once (even concatenated/minified/gzipped) doesn't make sense, but RequireJS/the r.js optimizer made it really easy to both figure out our usage pattern and consolidate our core set of modules. The process we use creates a different version of our app script for each entry page, and then each page has its own separate module that can be loaded on navigation.
Definitely, and I think your concerns are valid, but if you found that loading each file on demand yielded the optimal performance for your app, wouldn't you go with it? Additionally, I think the method the author is presenting can be very well suited to both partial bundles and individual files. For what it's worth, you and I are in similar positions and it sounds like we have very similar approaches with our own apps. As long as readers understand that this is one possible solution to a nontrivial problem, I'm happy with it.
Comments
Well put. My (and, I think others) concern with the article is that it advocates splitting all your code into separate files (great for maintainability and managing your code base), but then loading each of them individually on demand (probably a bad idea for all the reasons everyone's mentioned). I'm a lead dev on a fairly large JavaScript app, and we've taken that middle route - we use build process with Grunt and RequireJS to compile our 300+ individual script files into a handful of concatenated files divvied up by page/component. Our application is large enough that loading everything at once (even concatenated/minified/gzipped) doesn't make sense, but RequireJS/the r.js optimizer made it really easy to both figure out our usage pattern and consolidate our core set of modules. The process we use creates a different version of our app script for each entry page, and then each page has its own separate module that can be loaded on navigation.
Definitely, and I think your concerns are valid, but if you found that loading each file on demand yielded the optimal performance for your app, wouldn't you go with it? Additionally, I think the method the author is presenting can be very well suited to both partial bundles and individual files. For what it's worth, you and I are in similar positions and it sounds like we have very similar approaches with our own apps. As long as readers understand that this is one possible solution to a nontrivial problem, I'm happy with it.