Best way to organize jQuery/JavaScript code (2013) [closed]

Answer 1

For your question and comments I'll assume you are not willing to port your code to a framework like Backbone, or use a loader library like Require. You just want a better way to orgainze the code that you already have, in the simplest way possible.

I understand it is annoying to scroll through 2000+ lines of code to find the section that you want to work on. The solution is to split your code in different files, one for each functionality. For example sidebar.js, canvas.js etc. Then you can join them together for production using Grunt, together with Usemin you can have something like this:

In your html:

In your Gruntfile:

useminPrepare: {
  html: 'app/index.html',
  options: {
    dest: 'dist'
  }
},
usemin: {
  html: ['dist/{,*/}*.html'],
  css: ['dist/styles/{,*/}*.css'],
  options: {
    dirs: ['dist']
  }
}

If you want to use Yeoman it will give you a boilerplate code for all this.

Then for each file itself, you need to make sure you follow best practices and that all the code and variables are all in that file, and don't depend on other files. This doesn't mean you can't call functions of one file from other, the point is to have variables and functions encapsulated. Something similar to namespacing. I'll assume you don't want to port all your code to be Object Oriented, but if you don't mind refactoring a bit, I'd recommend to add something equivalent with what is called a Module pattern. It looks something like this:

sidebar.js

var Sidebar = (function(){
// functions and vars here are private
var init = function(){
  $("#sidebar #sortable").sortable({
            forceHelperSize: true,
            forcePlaceholderSize: true,
            revert: true,
            revert: 150,
            placeholder: "highlight panel",
            axis: "y",
            tolerance: "pointer",
            cancel: ".content"
       }).disableSelection();
  } 
  return {
   // here your can put your "public" functions
   init : init
  }
})();

Then you can load this bit of code like this:

$(document).ready(function(){
   Sidebar.init();
   ...

This will allow you to have a much more maintainable code without having to rewrite your code too much.