Approach to handle javascript on bigger projects?

Question

After discovering jQuery a few years ago, I realized how easy it was to really make interactive and user friendly websites without writing books of code. As the projects increas

Answer 1

I would like to recommend using javascript in a functional style which can be helped by abstractions like coffeescript and underscore.js.

Also minimising the cross module interaction and relying on an event driven code is a great way to keep your entire project organized. I defiantly like the way that backbone.js handles the module-view weak coupling by having view's bind the change events on modules.

Functional event based code is great for macro structure. I would also advice coupling javascript to the DOM. (Again backbone.js has a great example of how the model is completely dom independant and even the views aren't dependant on the dom. For all you care the views could be shooting data down a WebSocket)

I'm personally also a fan of having one central file manager rather then having a complicated require/include structure on every page. Load javascript modules from your central loader based on a page by page feature detection. (See here for an example of a central file manager).

I would also like to advocate the growing possibility of good re-use through node.js. There are quite a few people working on porting browser code verbatim to node.js or copying node.js code verbatim to the browser. (see YUI3 running on nodejs, node.js in the browser, commonJS in the browser Admittedly most of these are WIP and not stable.)