Echo JS 0.11.0

Yesterday I read this article and felt myself out of the modern development stream, like "stuck in early 2000 with script and link tags". I use RequireJS a lot, but haven't heard about css/less and template loaders before (yes, you can import a LESS file into a module with one line as a dependency).

StealJS optimizes caching and resource requests. It uses "two pass bundling algorithm" to combine dependencies/modules into bundles in the most effective way (watch the 1st 4minute video in the article about it). If you heard about WebPack, you know what a module bundler is. StealJS does even more in this direction.

It was designed to support a "modlet" workflow (watch the 2nd 6 minute video about this).

Works well for progressively or statically loaded sites. 

Another major difference from other module loaders (like RequireJS) is that StealJS can import modules from any format (AMD, CommonJS, ES6) and import to any format.

Most module loaders nowadays support all module "formats".  RequireJS is a weak comparison because RequireJS is one of the earliest module loaders and attempts to solve the problem in a very specific manner.  Furthermore, supporting many module formats is unlikely a perk for any dev team.  It just speaks more about "ok I can use this for my system".  Most dev teams have coding conventions and stick to one format throughout the project life time.

Bigger bonuses to me is being able to consider images, fonts, and CSS as modules.  That way my front-end codebase can be fully modular.

> Furthermore, supporting many module formats is unlikely a perk for any dev team

Here are two real usecases for a multi-format loader:

- What about an existing project, that can be already in one format, and team decides to switch to a different one?

- Also, bower component formats could be different from yours.

Good points.  Thanks.

Did you work with stealjs before? What module loaders do you like/use?

I have my own built on top of RequireJS/r.js and Grunt right now.  I think Webpack does a lot really well.  Never used StealJS, heard bad things from the past.