Question

I see that large projects like the jQuery UI will be comprised of many small files like those in the UI folder. I was wondering how those files become combined to be the thing I download from the website, or is that process unrelated?

Basically I’m looking to break up a large JS project into pieces and wondering if there’s some automated way of stitching it back together for users to download.

Answer 1

They use an ant script to build it:
https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/blob/master/build/build.xml

Specifically:
https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/blob/master/build/build.xml#L87 (concatenate target)

This is the code they use to concatenate all files into one:

<concat destfile="${dist.dir}/ui/${concatenated}.js">
  <filelist dir="${src.dir}/" files="${core.files}" />
  <fileset dir="${src.dir}/" includes="jquery.ui.*.js, jquery.effects.*.js" excludes="${core.files}" />
</concat>