Asynchronous Module Definition, or AMD for short, is all the rage in the Javascript world. It's essential to code organization, and it has the added bonus of speeding up your site. Yet, many people still don't know what it is, how it's useful or why they should care to learn it. The goal of this presentation is to change that by showing you how to use Require.js, one of the most popular AMD libraries. In this presention, I'll walk through the use of Require.js with Backbone.js, as well as how to use r.js (Require's compilation tool) to produce fast loading, production-ready code. While the focus of the talk isn't on Backbone, I will be covering some of its concepts to make sure everyone understands what is going on. And there will be a healthy dose of live coding, so you'll get to see it all in action.
As an added bonus, I'll also be showing off Bower (http://bower.io/) and Grunt (http://gruntjs.com/) as part of the process. Bower is a simple to use and extremely helpful tool for managing front-end javascript libraries like jQuery (and many plugins), Bootstrap, modernizr, normalize, Angular, Backbone, Underscore and many, _many_ others (over 2000 packages in the repo currently). Grunt is a tool for automating your javascript build process, which will save you a ton of time and make things like linting, concatinating, minifiying, compiling and testing your code a snap. These simple tools will make your web development so much easier and are worth the price of admission on their own!
