asemanfar - a blog about programming

For the past several months, I've been using a helper I wrote to manage my javascript dependencies. All it really does is allow you to specify which javascript files/libraries depend on others (i.e. scriptaculous depends on prototype) and make it easy to include them when you need them.

I didn't like having to include prototype.js, effect.js, and sidebar.js on every page, and I didn't like specifying all 3 from my view each time I needed it. So I wrote a helper, which is now available in plugin-form on GitHub.

Here is how you use it:

   1  # app/views/posts/index.html.erb
   2  <% js(:posts) %>

   1  # app/helpers/application_helper.rb
   2  module ApplicationHelper
   3    include JavascriptHelper
   4    def js_dependencies
   5      { :posts => [:effects] }
   6    end
   7  end

   1  # app/views/layouts/default.html.eb
   2  <%= javascript_tags -%>

And that's it. It's a work-in-progress and any comments/suggestions/git-hub pull requests are encouraged.