Sharing Modules Between the Client and Server
Files within your applicationâs public
directory can be
served by your application, of course, by they can also be used by it. If
thereâs a module providing some business logic you need for both the
client and server, itâs fragile to try and store it in two placesâthe
better strategy is to reference it from a single location. If youâre using
Require.js or similar on the client-side this is very easy because you can
import the module the same way in both places, but even if youâre not, you
can share code.
Because of the possibilities that reusing client-side code offers,
there are numerous utilities to create an unrendered DOM in Node, enabling
client-side code to run unmodified on the server. These things arenât
likely to disappearâthey can be necessary for scraping or spidering
content, for example. Because window
or document
objects may be created on the server by these tools, in shared modules
itâs safer to test whether weâre on the server-side than whether weâre on
the client. One way to do this is to look for the process
object:
(function(ns) { ns.modul = function() { console.log("works!"); }; return ns; }((typeof process !== "undefined" && process.title === "node") ? exports : myapp));
On the server, this will pass exports
into our function to use as a parent object. On the client, we can hardcode the global namespace being used there. Our module will attach whatever it exposes to that object without having to ...
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