Module Declarations
Dependencies will be exposed at the level of modules - this is an arbitrary sized collection of objects. It could be one function, one class, a group of function or a group of classes.
Modules will be declared like:
function (){
var moduleHandle = initialiseModule("my.module.namespace");
var namespace = {};
namespace.some_func = function(){
// delcaration of module
registerModule(moduleHandle, namespace);
}();
Dependency Registration
Modules will have to first register their dependencies (so that they can be loaded before they are needed) . Wildcards should be allowed for ease of use (and to encourage small modules).
registerDependency(moduleHandle, "some.module.namespace");
registerDependency(moduleHandle, "some.library.*");
Dependency Exposure
Secondly we have to expose the dependencies, ideally this needs to be done in the minimum possible scope to avoid scope contamination.
namespace.someFunc = function(){
var $ = exposeDependency("some.library.$");
}
Package Registration
To make this work the system will need to know which files satisfy which dependency. This will be achieved with a simple package declaration (probably stored in a package file)
registerPackage("some.library.*", "path/to/file.js");
Static Analysis
The ideal solution would also enable some kind of static dependency analysis by outputing some kind of dependency graph.
