SUMMARY

The module pattern remains a timeless tool for managing complexity. It allows developers to create segments of isolated logic, declare dependencies between these segments, and connect them together. What's more, the pattern is one that has proven to scale elegantly to arbitrary complexity and across platforms.

For years, the ecosystem grew around a contentious dichotomy between CommonJS, a module system targeted at server environments, and AMD, a module system targeted at latency-constrained client environments. Both systems enjoyed explosive growth, but the code written for each was in many ways at odds, and often incurred an unholy amount of boilerplate. What's more, neither system was natively implemented by browsers, and in the wake of this incompatibility rose a deluge of tooling that allowed for the module pattern to be used in browsers.

Included in the ECMAScript 6 specification is a wholly new concept for browser modules that takes the best of both worlds and...