This is a sequel for the Journey From RequireJS to Browserify post.

After publishing the previous post I got a lot of feedback saying that Browserify can’t do asynchronous module loading. Since that’s something I’d like to have with Browserify too I started looking on how to do it and after couple of pull requests and one published npm module later I’m happy to say it’s very much possible now!

Lately I have been very frustrated with RequireJS. I have a feeling that I have to fork almost every third party library I’m using in my projects. So I started investigating Browserify as an alternative. Here’s what I found.

During the last year or so I have been building quite a few apps on top of Backbone.js. The reason for choosing Backbone.js was the fact it’s fairly low level. It does not get in my way when I want to integrate some random crappy jQuery plugings or swap Ajax backend to Websockets in to my apps etc. Also it doesn’t isolate me to inside some framework wonderland jail. I really had to learn how to work with the DOM and how to arrange my code. This is good in the since it has given me good foundations how things generally work if I ever want to venture into some other frameworks.

But there is a downside to all this low levelness. With certain aspects you are really left alone by the framework. For me the hardest part was how to handle nested views.

During the development of Opinsys Labs site I had to bit hack on Octopress/Jekyll to make Guard::LiveReload to reliably.