Does the Javascript community have a dependency retrieval (like maven or gem)?

it looks like twitter is offering one answer :

cf. https://github.com/twitter/bower#readme

Bower (using Node and npm) is a package manager for the web. Bower lets you easily install assets such as images, CSS and JavaScript, and manages dependencies for you.

Bower is a generic tool which will resolve dependencies and lock packages down to a version. It runs over Git, and is package-agnostic. A package may contain JavaScript, CSS, images, etc., and doesn't rely on any particular transport (AMD, CommonJS, etc.).

Bower then makes available a simple programmatic API which exposes the package dependency model, so that existing build tools (like Sprockets, LoadBuilder, curls.js, Ender, etc.) can consume it and build files accordingly.

This depends on your server-side stack. Most dependency / package managers for server-side stacks also deal with javascript based dependencies.

npm is the node.js dependency manager. It's very popular.

It's based on the CommonJS package.json format.

There are movements to port this to the client like:

• EnderJS

You can't really do this with JavaScript alone as it has no IO in it. Even ender's command line tool relies on npm being installed. You should just use whatever tool comes with your server-side stack