6.3. Wrapping Up Modules

At this stage, we’ve got dependency management and namespacing, but there’s still the original problem: all those HTTP requests. Any module we depend on has to be loaded in remotely, and even though this happens asynchronously, it’s still a big performance overhead, slowing the startup of our application.

We’re also hand-wrapping our modules in the transport format which, while necessary for asynchronous loading, is fairly verbose. Let’s kill two birds with one stone by using a server-side step to concatenate the modules into one file. This means the browser has to fetch only one resource to load all the modules, which is much more efficient. The build tools available are intelligent, too—they don’t just bundle the modules arbitrarily, but statically analyze them to resolve their dependencies recursively. They’ll also take care of wrapping the modules up in the transport format, saving some typing.