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

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");});

As an addition to jrburke's answer, note that you don't have to return the constructor function directly. For most useful classes you'll also want to add methods via the prototype, which you can do like this:

define('Employee', function() {    // Start with the constructor    function Employee(firstName, lastName) {        this.firstName = firstName;        this.lastName = lastName;    }    // Now add methods    Employee.prototype.fullName = function() {        return this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName;    };    // etc.    // And now return the constructor function    return Employee;});

In fact this is exactly the pattern shown in this example at requirejs.org.