How can I share code between Node.js and the browser?
Epeli has a nice solution here http://epeli.github.com/piler/ that even works without the library, just put this in a file called share.js
(function(exports){
exports.test = function(){
return 'This is a function from shared module';
};
}(typeof exports === 'undefined' ? this.share = {} : exports));
On the server side just use:
var share = require('./share.js');
share.test();
And on the client side just load the js file and then use
share.test();
If you want to write a module that can be used both client side and server side, I have a short blog post on a quick and easy method: Writing for Node.js and the browser, essentially the following (where this
is the same as window
):
(function(exports){
// Your code goes here
exports.test = function(){
return 'hello world'
};
})(typeof exports === 'undefined'? this['mymodule']={}: exports);
Alternatively there are some projects aiming to implement the Node.js API on the client side, such as Marak's gemini.
You might also be interested in DNode, which lets you expose a JavaScript function so that it can be called from another machine using a simple JSON-based network protocol.