Refactored scope

One of my most personally successful philosophy’s in dealing with Web browsers is never blindly trust them.

My initial solution to loading in dependencies depended on a switchboard style approach, if browser support onready or similar events then bind an anonymous function to make the appropriate notice.  Else spin up a interval based checker anonymous function that looked every few seconds for the script for about a minute.    This solution kind of worked, but not reliably because it depended on browser detection vs. capabilities detection.

Instead of reworking things to attempt to ferret out what capabilities a foreign browser supports, I went with a brute force approach that will eventually be a foundation for a much more advanced system.

So the prototype works like such.

wm.loader.load(“someModule”) which becomes the path “/mods/someModule.js” and that is applied to a new script tag as it’s src attribute.  This is then appended to the head tag.  All pretty standard stuff actually.  What’s different is the notification process.

someModule.js contains a simple line “wm.loader.notify(“someModule”) ” which hits an internal dictionary and if this is the first notification, fire’s of a notice to the server.

Simple and guaranteed to work reliably.   Plus it gives me room to grow for later.

Like adding a call like “wm.loader.multi(“lib1″,”lib2″,”lib3″, 10,  function(){   doSomethingWhen Dependancies met });

arguments[0-2] can be detected and pushed to a callstack array, any integer can be assumed to be a time out period, and the last argument as an anonymous function can be assumed to be a onSuccess callback.   A dependency failure mechanism could be incorporated into the actual loader lib as either an observable emitter or just a cry for help back to the service.

More involved:

wm.loader.multi( ){
 
          var dependancies = [],  timeOut = -1,  callBack = None;
 
          loop through arguments:
                    if( current instanceof string ){
                           append to dependancies
                    } 
                    else if( current instanceof integer){
                             append to timeOut
                    } 
                    else if( current instanceof function ){
                                assign to callBack
                     }
 
              var dependancyCheck = function(loadedLib){
                                          pop loadLib from dependancies;
                                         if dependancies.length <= 0 then
                                                     cancel timeOut 
                                                     call  callback;
                                 }
             dependancies.map( wm.loader.load, dependancyCheck );
}

I would be lying if I said I knew this construct would work perfectly once I implement it, but I think the general idea is something to work with.