Provide a way to build standalone bundles without UMD

Currently the --standalone flag wraps the whole code in a silly UMD wrapper. This isn’t really helpful if you just want the standalone to register it self always as global. There should be away to turn UMD off, or provide your own template instead.

[aldendaniels]

Hey @jstayton - sure thing.

All Browserify bundles are defined within a wrapping closure so nothing in your bundle will leak out. The issue is that JavaScript doesn’t currently provide a good way to keep global variables from “leaking in”. In other words, your code and bundled dependencies can reference global variables that someone else defined.

Imagine that your script is deployed to a site that’s already using AMD. AMD defines a global define function. No problem - that shouldn’t affect your code. Now imagine that your code includes a UMD dependency that goes looking for the existence of define to decide whether it should behave as an AMD or CommonJS script. Now you have a problem, since your dependency will convert itself to AMD in this environment.

Ideally JavaScript would provide a way for a closure to “whitelist” which global variables it could access - window for example. Since this feature doesn’t exist, we instead need to blacklist the global variables the closure doesn’t want access to by redefining them within the closure.

When (and only when) you use the --standalone flag, Browserify does exactly this for define, module, and exports.

[aldendaniels]

@3rd-Eden, you can achieve your desired behavior today using the https://github.com/primus/deumdify plugin. It’s a hack, but a useful and well-maintained one. 😃