RequireJS 0.14.0 Released

RequireJS 0.14.0 is now available. The big changes:

• Anonymous modules support, CommonJS Asynchronous Module proposal supported.
• Loading modules from CommonJS packages.
• Bug fixes (see commits starting from (see commits starting from 2010-09-15 through 2010-09-26))

This is a significant release. Thanks to Kris Zyp for figuring out how to make anonymous modules work with IE, and to Tom Robinson for the suggestion to use Function.prototype.toString() to make converting traditional CommonJS modules easier.

The async module format/async require that is now supported by RequireJS really feels like it is the best of both worlds: something that is close enough to traditional CommonJS modules to allow those environments to support the format, while still having something that performs well and is easy to debug in the browser. I really hope the format can be natively supported in existing CommonJS engines. Until then, RequireJS works in Rhino and has an adapter for Node.

I put up a CommonJS Notes page for people coming from a CommonJS background. Also, the API docs are updated to reflect the simpler anonymous module format, and it includes a new section about loading modules from CommonJS packages.

What is next

Working with CommonJS packages has a few manual steps: finding the package, downloading it, configuring its location. I want to work on a command line package tool that makes this easy. Hopefully it will be able to talk to a server-side package registry too, to allow simpler package lookups by name (something like npm, but something that can house modules in a format used by RequireJS). Kris Zyp has already done some work in this area, and I hope to just use it outright for RequireJS, or leverage the code.

Once that lands, then it feels like it will be time for a RequireJS 1.0 release. The code has been very usable for a few releases now, but I have kept the release numbers below 1.0 to indicate that the final mix of features were being worked out. With the changes in this release, it feels like the major format changes have landed. For those of you who have used previous RequireJS releases, your code should still work fine, and it should work as-is in future releases too.