Question

I’m building an in-browser MVC application which will eventually run on a mobile device via PhoneGap. The app will communicate with the API server but will otherwise be completely independent. When I develop standard server-side MVC applications in Rails, the models, views, and controllers are separated into distinct files and directories. What’s the standard practice with in-browser MVC apps? Are the MVC components usually defined within a single JS file, or are they usually separated out?

Answer 1

During the development phase, yes javascript files should be separated and well documented..
You can use requirejs to load your modules/views/collections separately.

Here is a great tutorial about Asynchronous Module Definitions (AMD). It’s mainly about how you would organize your application using modules. I suggest you read it.
Below is the sample project structure the tutorial’s author uses:

├── js
│   ├── libs
│   │   ├── jquery
│   │   │   ├── jquery.min.js
│   │   ├── backbone
│   │   │   ├── backbone.min.js
│   │   └── underscore
│   │   │   ├── underscore.min.js
│   ├── models
│   │   ├── users.js
│   │   └── projects.js
│   ├── collections
│   │   ├── users.js
│   │   └── projects.js
│   ├── views
│   │   ├── projects
│   │   │   ├── list.js
│   │   │   └── edit.js
│   │   └── users
│   │       ├── list.js
│   │       └── edit.js
│   ├── router.js
│   ├── app.js
│   ├── main.js
│   ├── order.js
│   └── text.js
└── index.html

For the validation/deployment phase, use a grunt-like tool to launch automated tasks. Such as concatenating and minifying javascript files into a single one. (It takes around 30 seconds depending on how you’ve configured it)
Here is an example of a grunt file.