We are trying to switch the packaging for our project from dojo to google closure, but we haven't had any luck so far. Here is a simple example that illustrates what we are trying to accomplish:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="runtime/src/core/lib/goog-rev26/base.js"></script>
<script>
goog.require("foo.bar");
function main() {foo.bar.echo("hello world")}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="main()">
</body>
</html>
Then in /foo/bar.js
I have:
goog.provide("foo.bar");
foo.bar.echo = function(s) {console.debug(s);}
The errors I receive in firebug are as follows:
goog.require could not find: foo.bar foo is not defined
When I look in the Net tab, there isn't an http request out to fetch a file - I was expecting the closure library to generate a script tag to fetch bar.js
.
help! ;)
I was able to get it to work by adding the following to
deps.js
:goog.addDependency('../../../foo/bar.js', ['foo.bar'], []);
Firefox now makes an http request to
/foo/bar.js
when it encounters thegoog.requires
statement.However, the file contains this comment:
// This file has been auto-generated by GenJsDeps, please do not edit.
According to this,
GenJsDeps
is the same ascalcdeps.py
. If you look at the documentation, it looks like there is an-o deps
switch which will re-generatedeps.js
so it isn't edited manually.Update!!!
New version of calcdeps.py changes the game a little bit. To create your deps.js you now need to use the -d flag. eg:
To compile:
So the process is actually now a lot easier, but you have to use your powers of ESP to find out about it as its totally undocumented. The calcdeps.py now also does not work with Python 3.1 on windows so that is also heaps of fun. A few hacks got it working for me (which I will not put here as I'm not a python programmer and there must be better ways to do it).
Generally the last day has been super fun, hope this post helps someone avoid the same enjoyment.
Guido
solution:
download closure to your project externals (or assets, whatever).
don't bother with setting onload, delay, playing with async, etc..
they won't work (they are also very poor design pattern and extremely lame..)
- this is your
main.js
where you dynamically injecting your code into the DOM (for example creating a bookmarklet or something):now:
base.js
add the the end of the file
your "callback" simply activates starter when the file has done rendering,
it works perfectly and it keeps loading every resource asynchronously.
p.s.
2. on
base.js
you could also avoid the timeout and just usebut as a rule of thumb modern browsers acts better when you wrap those "don't care, just do this stuff at the end, like JSONProtocol callback" stuff-
timeouts (mostly used with values from 0-5) are not interrupted as timeouts but as a way to breaks the synchronicity of the code-block allowing truly "context-switch"-like behavior.
although there is an extra overhead there.
Here's a little project that I've been working on that might be helpful to you: http://github.com/fintler/lanyard
Take a look at the build.xml, the file named lanyard.js, and all of the files located in src/geom/*.
The build.xml has an example of how to call calcdeps.py through ant for all of the js located in src. It may not be the best way to do things, but it's been working for me so far.
Either way to get custom modules working, at least for development version, is to include manually js files in head section of html page, after google's base.js file inclusion.
But, you should care about sequence of inclusion by yourself. For not very large custom files sets it works good. For production version you still had better use js source compiling to get all benefits of closure library.
Yes you should use calcdepds.py. I created a big blog post after much trial and error to figure out the best way to do this, I also go over the differences between dojo.require and goog.require:
http://apphacker.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/howto-how-to-use-goog-require-and-goog-provide-for-your-own-code/