JET and RequireJS by Lauren Beatty


What is RequireJS and why is it important?

RequireJS is a JavaScript file and module loader. Oracle JET uses Require to load only the libraries and modules/components that are needed for a particular part of an Oracle JET application.

As the JavaScript world has taken off, web applications have grown large, and monolithic client.js files have become the norm. This type of code “organization” is difficult to maintain, read and test. In addition, more and more libraries, frameworks, plugins, etc. are being included in applications, making the loading of those resources complicated and slow. Truly, it is a waste to load every script file for each page of an application if it is not needed to run that particular page.

Require was born out of the need to reduce this code complexity. As such, it improves the speed and quality of our code. At its heart, RequireJS was designed to encourage and support modular development.

What is modular development?

Modular development separates out code into distinct functional units. This kind of organization is easy to maintain, easy to read (when coming into an existing project, for example), easy to test, and increases code re-usability. RequireJS supports the Asynchronous Module Definition (AMD) API for JavaScript modules. AMD has a particular way of encapsulating a module and embraces asynchronous loading of a module and its dependencies:

In this module, we call define with an array of the dependencies needed. The dependencies are passed into the factory function as arguments. Importantly, the function is only executed once the required dependencies are loaded.

What does Require look like in Oracle JET

In an Oracle JET application, RequireJS is set up in the main.js (aka “bootstrap”) file. First we need to configure the paths to the various scripts/libraries needed for the app. Here is an example of the RequireJS configuration in the main.js file of the Oracle JET QuickStart template. It establishes the names and paths to all of the various libraries necessary to run the application: Read the complete article here.

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