Organizing routes without pre loading the modules in nodejs express

Question

Currently the routing in Express framework requires the module to be loaded before. But that would not be efficient in real life scenarios where there are hundreds of module. I would like to load only the module that is needed. Is there a way where I can define a route to a target module without pre loading the module.

Something like this

app.get('user/showall', 'user.list');

So I would like user module to be loaded only when that particular request needs it to be loaded.

Answer 1

I would rather have a slow startup with fast request handling than fast startup with slow request handling because modules have to be loaded at runtime.

But if you really want, you could create a middleware to implement such behaviour (totally untested):

 var lazyload = function(route) {

   var s = route.split('.');
   var mod = s[0];
   var exp = s[1];

   return function(req, res, next) {
     require(mod)[exp](req, res);
   };
 };
 ...
 app.get('user/showall', lazyload('user.list'));

(this assumes that routes are always named MODULENAME.EXPORTEDNAME).