Sebastian Rittau's Blog

I've given in in the JavaScript and Modules matter. I'm doing now what all the cool kids are doing: Using XMLHttpRequest synchronously to load external JavaScript files. This has the advantage that it works synchronously, a very important thing for includes. Therefore I don't need callback and moduleLoaded hackery anymore. Also I have sensible error checking, i.e. I can notice when loading a JavaScript module failed. This enables me to have multiple search paths, for example, and sensible error handling.

But it comes at a cost, too. XMLHttpRequest is only supported by "modern browsers". But since moderns browsers means any browser of the last five years I don't care too much. When XMLHttpRequest is not supported, I suppose I can't rely on other useful stuff neither. The synchronous requests also mean that there might be a slight performance hit. But the advantages of synchronous includes outweigh this by far. Finally, XMLHttpRequest doesn't provide the means to recognize when a synchronous request is stalled. This is not of too much concern, since a stalled request usually means that an include files can't be downloaded and so the JavaScript application is not usable anyways. It might be a concern for sensibly degrading, though.

Update: Here is the code to the updated module. Using it is now as simple as this:

<script src="include-http.js"></script>
<script>
    include.include("my.module");
    myfunc(...);
</script>