RequireJS: How to define modules that contain a single "class"?

Question

I have a number of JavaScript "classes" each implemented in its own JavaScript file. For development those files are loaded individually, and for production they are concatenated, but in both cases I have to manually define a loading order, making sure that B comes after A if B uses A. I am planning to use RequireJS as an implementation of CommonJS Modules/AsynchronousDefinition to solve this problem for me automatically.

Is there a better way to do this than to define modules that each export one class? If not, how to you name what the module exports? A module "employee" exporting a class "Employee", as in the example below, doesn't feel DRY enough to me.

define("employee", ["exports"], function(exports) {     exports.Employee = function(first, last) {         this.first = first;         this.last = last;     }; });  define("main", ["employee"], function (employee) {     var john = new employee.Employee("John", "Smith"); }); 

Answer 1

The AMD proposal allows you to just return a value for the exported object. But note that is a feature of the AMD proposal, it is just an API proposal, and will make it harder to translate the module back to a regular CommonJS module. I think that is OK, but useful info to know.

So you can do the following:

I prefer modules that export a constructor function to start with an upper-case name, so the non-optimized version of this module would also be in Employee.js

define("Employee", function () {     //You can name this function here,     //which can help in debuggers but     //has no impact on the module name.     return function Employee(first, last) {         this.first = first;          this.last = last;     }; }); 

Now in another module, you can use the Employee module like so:

define("main", ["Employee"], function (Employee) {     var john = new Employee("John", "Smith"); });