expose defined as requirejs._defined

[ryanflorence]

use cases:

• debugging
• tooling
• allows frameworks to check if a module is
  defined or not before providing a default module

[ryanflorence]

Sorry for the new PR, I guess github doesn't update the PR if its closed.

See discussion here: #63

I opted for exposing the entire registry instead of creating a require.defined('foo') method. Though I think adding defined would be great, having exposure to the entire registry is a lot more helpful for debugging and tooling: consider misspelled modules definitions, and tools that could list all defined modules.

Let me know if this pull request needs anything else.

Thanks :)

[devinus]

@rpflorence Having access to the entire registry makes a lot of sense for those use cases.

This is more of a question for @jrburke: Is there anything that RequireJS exposes like this functionality? Is there something both projects could standardize on? Also, why does this have to be exposed as _defined? To me, it seems like that's a private API, yet this seems like a very useful functionality that should be exposed without qualms.

[devinus]

What I'm thinking:

requirejs.registry = function() {
  // Keep it protected
  return defined;
}

[jrburke]

I think a private API is still important: a public one would signal that normal modules should feel OK using it and modifying the module cache. However, there are no guarantees across loaders for this, and for some more secure-minded uses of a module loader, can cause problems if the loader cache is considered protected. For the secure cases, they could opt to remove the publicly accessible "private" API entry point.

Ideally, I would standardize access to the module cache uniformly across requirejs and almond, but they serve different purposes, mainly requirejs supports multiple "contexts" of modules, which almond does not. The requirejs private point for this cache is requirejs.s.contexts._.defined. I would not want to mimic that object structure here in almond because almond does not care about contexts, and it is more byte weight for what is supposed to be a smaller shim. So I am going to take this pull request as-is.

[jrburke]

Merged, and released as 0.2.6.