ECMAScript 6 Module Loading

In the past we had looked at working with classes in ECMAScript 6, the “next version of JavaScript.” Another component of ES6 that you will find prevalent is module loading. These are basically the same conceptual implementation of modules that you will find in Node.js. Modules in ES6 solve the problem of scope and dependency management. In the past with ES5 a variable or function just declared in the open — whether in a script block in an HTML file or in an external .js file — like so….

function sayHi(name) {
    return "Hi, " + name;
}

would be considered to be bad practice because you were polluting the global object (which is often the window object in the context of the web). As the size and complexity of your application grew the maintainability of it would become a lot more difficult because you would have to worry about potentially overwriting other variables and functions later on in your application if you happened to name them the same or accidentally assign them a value that you did not intend to. Because of this, you often saw applications “namespace” the various methods and variables of an application to objects like so…

var app = app || {};
app.greeting = {
    sayHi: function (name) {
        return "Hi, " + name;
    }
};

to avoid polluting the global object.

With ES6 modules, however, all of this becomes unnecessary. You can declare functions and variables freely and the scope is always local to that file unless explicitly specified as a global object. This makes managing scope and maintaining your application a lot easier.

If you have ever done any development with Node.js, you should be somewhat familiar with modules as it follows a particular form and structure known as the CommonJS module loading syntax. Basically the idea is that you can import various functions and methods from other JavaScript files into your own JavaScript file by using the “import” keyword. You reference the path to the file you are loading as a module from the location of the file you are importing your module(s) into. So let’s say in your project you had a file called “greeting.js” that lived in a folder named “lib” with the following code in it

export function sayHi(name) {
    return "Hi, " + name;
}
export function sayHello(name) {
    return "Hello, " + name;
}
export function sayHey(name) {
    return "Hey, " + name;
}

The “exports” keyword means that these functions are exported and can be imported into other JavaScript files. For example, in the root of your project (one level up from the “lib” directory) let’s say you had a file called main.js. In that file you could do the following…

import * as greet from 'lib/greeting';

console.log(greet.sayHi('Joe')); // "Hi, Joe"
console.log(greet.sayHello('Sally')); // "Hello, Sally"

Here we are importing all of the exported functions in the greeting.js file into a variable called “greet” using the * wildcard locally to our main.js file. If there were any other exported functions or properties in our greeting.js file, this would be available in main.js as well.

There are other syntaxes that can be utilized in module importing. For example, if we only wanted the sayHi and sayHello methods imported from our greeting.js file (and we did not want or need the sayHey method for some reason) we could do the following in main.js…

import { sayHi, sayHello } from 'lib/greeting';

console.log(sayHi('Joe')); // "Hi, Joe"
console.log(sayHello('Sally')); // "Hello, Sally"

There are other variations on the importing syntax and implementation as well that we might see as we go along. The main point is that this gives you a lot of flexibility in how you structure your application. Doing all of this is not too dissimilar from the importing that you would so in Java…

import com.domain.package;

or C#

using System.Net;

The difference being that in JavaScript you import from the path to the file and in Java and C# the packages are compiled into memory and imported from there. But in all cases the approach serves the same purpose.

You could also use the require syntax (again familiar from Node.js) to import a module…

var greet = require('lib/greeting.js')

console.log(greet.sayHi('Joe')); // "Hi, Joe"
console.log(greet.sayHello('Sally')); // "Hello, Sally"

The choice is yours depending on which you prefer.