My attempt to understand the dark side… err… AMD/RequireJS

Yes, it’s true. I’m finally building a full app with RequireJS, on my own. I’ve worked with it plenty in the past, but always on other people’s projects. I don’t have very many nice things to say about RequireJS, because of my experience with it and with solving the same problems in other manners. But, I need to get this under my belt, as a large-ish project that is built from the ground up with RequireJS.

My intent to is to better understand RequireJS, it’s use cases and patterns, and form a more insightful and educated opinion. I am doing my best to open my mind about it and even allow my opinion to be changed. A lot of the problems I had with RequireJS back in my consulting days have been addressed. Shims, for example, make it easier to get non-AMD code in to RequireJS (though this isn’t without problems, still). There are still things I don’t like, though. We’ll see.

So far, the experience has been painful, frustrating, and left me with a continued sense of “WHY?!?!??!!!!!”. I realize that some of this is just me and my opinions, though, and I’m doing my best to learn through it, and see how RequireJS wants things to work instead of how I want things to work.

I already have a few blog posts lined up for things I’m running in to and doing… none of which are meant to be a “do it this way” kind of post. In my typical style, I’ll be posting what I’m learning, as I’m learning it. That means a lot of what I say will be stupid, wrong and a bad idea. But that’s the point. Getting this stuff out there will bring feedback and help me learn faster.