Previously we have looked at the basic configuration of SystemJS and what happens when you attempt to load modules. What we have covered so far is good enough for a development system, but things are different when you try to push your code to production and performance is much more important. It might be fine for a development system to make XHR requests for each individual script file, but that is not ideal for most production systems. This article will attempt to evaluate the production setup that is needed to attain good performance. [Read more…]

In the last article we took a look at some of the basic configuration options of SystemJS and also the high level workflow of what happens when you attempt to import a module. This article is going to walk through what happens from when a script has been fetched by the browser until a module instance is returned, as well as provide some information on creating plugins for SystemJS. [Read more…]

The ECMA2015 module syntax for JavaScript was a much needed addition to the language. For years now the JavaScript community has tried to make up for the lack of a standard module format with several competing formats: AMD, CommonJS, and then UMD which tried to wrap both of the others. The introduction of an official module syntax, details of which can be found at the MDN imports documentation page, means that there is going to be a new module loader required to load the new format. Unfortunately the ECMA2015 specification ended up not including a module loader, but there is a proposal with the WhatWG team to add a module loader to the browser. SystemJS is a module loader built on top of the original ES6 module loader polyfill and soon to be the polyfill for the WhatWG module loader. This series of articles is going to take a deep dive into SystemJS and see what all it has to offer. [Read more…]