Does it make sense to use Require js with Angular js

Question

I m a newbie to Angular js and trying to understand how it s different from Backbone js    We used to manage our packages dependencies with Require js while using Backbone  Does it make sense to do the same with Angular js

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As  ganaraj mentioned AngularJS has dependency injection at its core  When building toy seed applications with and without RequireJS  I personally found RequireJS was probably overkill for most use cases   That doesn t mean RequireJS is not useful for it s script loading capabilities and keeping your codebase clean during development  Combining the r js optimizer  https   github com jrburke r js  with almond  https   github com jrburke almond  can create a very slim script loading story  However since its dependency management features are not as important with angular at the core of your application  you can also evaluate other client side  HeadJS  LABjs       or even server side  MVC4 Bundler       script loading solutions for your particular application

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Using RequireJS with AngularJS makes sense but only if you understand how each of them works regarding dependency injection  as although both of them injects dependencies  they inject very different things   AngularJS has its own dependency system that let you inject AngularJS modules to a newly created module in order to reuse implementations  Let s say you created a  first  module that implements an AngularJS filter  greet    angular    module  first          filter  greet   function         return function name          return  Hello      name                      And now let s say you want to use the  greet  filter in another module called  second  that implements a  goodbye  filter  You may do that injecting the  first  module to the  second  module   angular    module  second     first       filter  goodbye   function         return function name          return  Good bye      name                      The thing is that in order to make this work correctly without RequireJS  you have to make sure that the  first  AngularJS module is loaded on the page before you create the  second  AngularJS module  Quoting documentation      Depending on a module implies that required module needs to be loaded   before the requiring module is loaded    In that sense  here is where RequireJS can help you as RequireJS provides a clean way to inject scripts to the page helping you organize script dependencies between each other   Going back to the  first  and  second  AngularJS modules  here is how you can do it using RequireJS separating the modules on different files to leverage script dependencies loading      firstModule js file define   angular    function angular      angular      module  first            filter  greet   function           return function name            return  Hello      name                                 secondModule js file define   angular    firstModule    function angular      angular      module  second     first         filter  goodbye   function           return function name            return  Good bye      name                              You can see that we are depending on  firstModule  file to be injected before the content of the RequireJS callback can be executed which needs  first  AngularJS module to be loaded to create  second  AngularJS module   Side note  Injecting  angular  on the  firstModule  and  secondModule  files as dependency is required in order to use AngularJS inside the RequireJS callback function and it have to be configured on RequireJS config to map  angular  to the library code  You may have AngularJS loaded to the page in a traditional manner too  script tag  although defeats RequireJS benefits    More details on having RequireJS support from AngularJS core from 2 0 version on my blog post   Based on my blog post  Making sense of RequireJS with AngularJS   here is the link

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Answer from Brian Ford  AngularJS has it s own module system an typically doesn t need something like RJS   Reference  https   github com yeoman generator-angular issues 40

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Yes it makes sense to use requireJS with Angular  I spent several days to test several technical solutions   I made an Angular Seed with RequireJS on Server Side  Very simple one  I use SHIM notation for no AMD module and not AMD because I think it s very difficult to deal with two different Dependency injection system    I use grunt and r js to concatenate js files on server depends on the SHIM configuration  dependency  file  So I refer only one js file in my app   For more information go on my github Angular Seed   https   github com matohawk angular-seed-requirejs

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I think that it depends on your project complexity since angular is pretty much modularized   Your controllers can be mapped and you can just import those JavaScript classes in your index html page    But in case your project get bigger  Or you anticipates such scenario  you should integrate angular with requirejs  In this article you can see a demo app for such integration

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Yes  it does  specially for very large SPA   In some scenario  RequireJS is a must   For example  I develop PhoneGap applications using AngularJS that also uses Google Map API   Without AMD loader like RequireJS  the app would simply crash upon launch when offline as it cannot source the Google Map API scripts   An AMD loader gives me a chance to display an error message to the user   However  integration between AngularJS and RequireJS is a bit tricky   I created angularAMD to make this a less painful process   http   marcoslin github io angularAMD

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Yes  it makes sense       Angular modules don t try to solve the problem of script load ordering   or lazy script fetching  These goals are orthogonal and both module   systems can live side by side and fulfil their goals       Source  Angular JS official website

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I would avoid using Require js  Apps I ve seen that do this wind up a mess of multiple types of module pattern architecture   AMD  Revealing  different flavors of IIFE  etc   There are other ways to load on demand like the loadOnDemand Angular mod   Adding other stuff just fills your code full of cruft and creates a low signal to noise ratio and makes your code hard to read

User · Answer

To restate what I think the OP s question really is      If I m building an application principally in Angular 1 x  and  implicitly  doing so in the era of Grunt Gulp Broccoli and Bower NPM  and I maybe have a couple additional library dependencies  does Require add clear  specific value beyond what I get by using Angular without Require     Or  put another way        Does vanilla Angular need Require to manage basic Angular component-loading effectively  if I have other ways of handling basic script-loading     And I believe the basic answer to that is   not unless you ve got something else going on  and or you re unable to use newer  more modern tools     Let s be clear at the outset  RequireJS is a great tool that solved some very important problems  and started us down the road that we re on  toward more scalable  more professional Javascript applications  Importantly  it was the first time many people encountered the concept of modularization and of getting things out of global scope  So  if you re going to build a Javascript application that needs to scale  then Require and the AMD pattern are not bad tools for doing that   But  is there anything particular about Angular that makes Require AMD a particularly good fit  No  In fact  Angular provides you with its own modularization and encapsulation pattern  which in many ways renders redundant the basic modularization features of AMD  And  integrating Angular modules into the AMD pattern is not impossible  but it s a bit    finicky  You ll definitely be spending time getting the two patterns to integrate nicely   For some perspective from the Angular team itself  there s this  from Brian Ford  author of the Angular Batarang and now a member of the Angular core team      I don t recommend using RequireJS with AngularJS  Although it s certainly possible  I haven t seen any instance where RequireJS was beneficial in practice    So  on the very specific question of AngularJS  Angular and Require AMD are orthogonal  and in places overlapping  You can use them together  but there s no reason specifically related to the nature patterns of Angular itself    But what about basic management of internal and external dependencies for scalable Javascript applications  Doesn t Require do something really critical for me there   I recommend checking out Bower and NPM  and particularly NPM  I m not trying to start a holy war about the comparative benefits of these tools  I merely want to say  there are other ways to skin that cat  and those ways may be even better than AMD Require   They certainly have much more popular momentum in late-2015  particularly NPM  combined with ES6 or CommonJS modules  See related SO question    What about lazy-loading   Note that lazy-loading and lazy-downloading are different  Angular s lazy-loading doesn t mean you re pulling them direct from the server  In a Yeoman-style application with javascript automation  you re concatenating and minifying the whole shebang together into a single file  They re present  but not executed instantiated until needed  The speed and bandwidth improvements you get from doing this vastly  vastly outweigh any alleged improvements from lazy-downloading a particular 20-line controller  In fact  the wasted network latency and transmission overhead for that controller is going to be an order of magnitude greater than the size of the controller itself   But let s say you really do need lazy-downloading  perhaps for infrequently-used pieces of your application  such as an admin interface  That s a very legitimate case  Require can indeed do that for you  But there are also many other  potentially more flexible options that accomplish the same thing  And Angular 2 0 will apparently take care of this for us  built-in to the router   Details    But what about during development on my local dev boxen   How can I get all my dozens hundreds of script files loaded without needing to attach them all to index html manually   Have a look at the sub-generators in Yeoman s generator-angular  or at the automation patterns embodied in generator-gulp-angular  or at the standard Webpack automation for React  These provide you a clean  scalable way to either  automatically attach the files at the time that components are scaffolded  or to simply grab them all automatically if they are present in certain folders match certain glob-patterns  You never again need to think about your own script-loading once you ve got the latter options    Bottom-line   Require is a great tool  for certain things  But go with the grain whenever possible  and separate your concerns whenever possible  Let Angular worry about Angular s own modularization pattern  and consider using ES6 modules or CommonJS as a general modularization pattern  Let modern automation tools worry about script-loading and dependency-management  And take care of async lazy-loading in a granular way  rather than by tangling it up with the other two concerns    That said  if you re developing Angular apps but can t install Node on your machine to use Javascript automation tools for some reason  then Require may be a good alternate solution  And I ve seen really elaborate setups where people want to dynamically load Angular components that each declare their own dependencies or something  And while I d probably try to solve that problem another way  I can see the merits of the idea  for that very particular situation    But otherwise    when starting from scratch with a new Angular application and flexibility to create a modern automation environment    you ve got a lot of other  more flexible  more modern options    Updated repeatedly to keep up with the evolving JS scene

User · Answer

Short answer is  it make sense  Recently this was discussed in ng-conf 2014  Here is the talk on this topic   http   www youtube com watch v 4yulGISBF8w

User · Answer

Yes it makes sense to use angular js along with require js wherein you can use require js for modularizing components   There is a seed project which uses both angular js and require js

User · Answer

This I believe is a subjective question  so I will provide my subjective opinion    Angular has a modularization mechanism built in  When you create your app  the first thing you would do is   var app   angular module  myApp      and then  app directive        app controller        app service         If you have a look at the angular-seed which is neat starter app for angular  they have separated out the directives  services  controllers etc into different modules and then loaded those modules as dependancies on your main app   Something like    var app   angular module  myApp    Directives   Controllers   Services      Angular also lazy loads these modules   into memory  not their script files    In terms of lazy loading script files  to be frank unless you are writing something extremely large it would be an overkill because angular by its very nature reduces the amount of code you write  A typical app written in most other frameworks could expect a reduction in around 30-50  in LOC if written in angular

User · Answer

It makes sense to use requirejs with angularjs if you plan on lazy loading controllers and directives etc  while also combining multiple lazy dependencies into single script files for much faster lazy loading  RequireJS has an optimisation tool that makes the combining easy  See http   ify io using-requirejs-with-optimisation-for-lazy-loading-angularjs-artefacts

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Here is the approach I use  http   thaiat github io blog 2014 02 26 angularjs-and-requirejs-for-very-large-applications   The page shows a possible implementation of AngularJS   RequireJS  where the code is split by features and then component type

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