A RequireJS plugin helper module.

Useful for creating loader plugins for:

• Templates (eg Handlebars, Mustache)
• Compilers (eg CoffeeScript, ES6 conversion)

Supports:

• Cross-browser XHR for dynamic loading
• Resource builds in different server environments
• Cross-origin dynamic loading with CORS
• Precompiled resources with the optimizeAllPluginResources: true r.js build option.

This module is in planning to be used as a base for the Require-CS module.

• ES6 plugin
• CommonJS plugin

Suppose I want to make a template plugin called "awesometpl". I want to allow users to do:

  define(['awesometpl!some-template-file'], function(compiledTemplate) {
    document.body.innerHTML = compiledTemplate({ tpl: 'var' });
  });

And have it automatically load some-template-file.awesomeext and compile it for us, including build support.

Manually creating this plugin can be a lot of work.

AMD Loader can make it for us in just a few lines:

awesometpl.js:

  define(['amd-loader', 'awesome-compiler'], function(amdLoader, awesomeCompiler) {
    return amdLoader('awesometpl', 'awesomeext', function(name, source, req, callback, errback, config) {
      callback(awesomeCompiler.compile(source));
    });
  });

When used in production, one still has to manually stub the plugin to exclude from the build, as well as the compiler. This also stops dynamic loads working in production.

These configurations can be avoided entirely, and dynamic loads can still work in production, by using a pluginBuilder form of the loader helper.

For the template example above, we can then do the following:

awesometpl.js:

  define(['amd-loader'], function(amdLoader) {
    var pluginBuilder = './awesometpl-build';
    return amdLoader('awesometpl', 'awesomeext', function(name, source, req, callback, errback, config) {
      require(['awesome-compiler'], function(awesomeCompiler) {
        callback(awesomeCompiler.compile(source));
      });
    });
  });

awesometpl-build.js:

  define(['amd-loader', 'awesome-compiler'], function(amdLoader, awesomeCompiler) {
    return amdLoader('awesometpl', 'awesomeext', function(name, source, req, callback, errback, config) {
      callback(awesomeCompiler.compile(source));
    });
  });

Now builds with the plugin will work without needing any configuration. awesome-compiler is excluded from the build by default (pending issue https://github.com/jrburke/r.js/issues/289), and we don't need to provide any stub configuration to exclude the plugin from the build.

Because the awesome-compiler is only loaded when the first dynamic call is made, it isn't included in production by default, but can still be loaded in if necessary.

MIT