JavaScript dependency management

Question

I am currently maintaining a large number of JS files and the dependency issue is growing over my head. Right now I have each function in a separate file and I manually main

Answer 1

As @bobince already suggested, doing static analysis on a JavaScript program is a close to impossible problem to crack. Google Closure compiler does it to some extent but then it also relies on external help from JSDoc comments.

I had a similar problem of finding the order in which JS files should be concatenated in a previous project, and since there were loads of JS files, manually updating the inclusion order seemed too tedious. Instead, I stuck with certain conventions of what constitutes a dependency for my purposes, and based upon that and using simple regexp :) I was able to generated the correct inclusion order.

The solution used a topological sort algorithm to generate a dependency graph which then listed the files in the order in which they should be included to satisfy all dependencies. Since each file was basically a pseudo-class using MooTools syntax, there were only 3 ways dependencies could be created for my situation.

1. When a class Extended some other class.
2. When a class Implemented some other class.
3. When a class instantiated an object of some other class using the new keyword.

It was a simple, and definitely a broken solution for general purpose usage but it served me well. If you're interested in the solution, you can see the code here - it's in Ruby.

If your dependencies are more complex, then perhaps you could manually list the dependencies in each JS file itself using comments and some homegrown syntax such as:

// requires: Array
// requires: view/TabPanel
// requires: view/TabBar

Then read each JS file, parse out the requires comments, and construct a dependency graph which will give you the inclusion order you need.