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I was asked an interesting Ender question on IRC (#enderjs on Freenode) and as I was answering it, it occurred to me that the subject would be an ideal way to explain how Ender's multi-library bundling works. So here is that explanation!

The original question went something like this:

When a browser first visits my page, they only get served Bonzo (a DOM manipulation library) as a stand-alone library, but on returning visits they are also served Qwery (a selector engine), Bean (an event manager) and a few other modules in an Ender build. Can I integrate Bonzo into the Ender build on the browser for repeat visitors?

Wait, what's Ender?

Let's step back a bit and start with some basics. The way I generally explain Ender to people is that it's two different things:

1. It's a build tool, for bundling JavaScript libraries together into a single file. The resulting file constitutes a new "framework" based around the jQuery-style DOM element collection pattern: $('selector').method(). The constituent libraries provide the functionality for the methods and may also provide the selector engine functionality.
2. It's an ecosystem of JavaScript libraries. Ender promotes a small collection of libraries as a base, called The Jeesh, which together provide a large portion of the functionality normally required of a JavaScript framework, but there are many more libraries compatible with Ender that add extra functionality. Many of the libraries available for Ender are also usable outside of Ender as stand-alone libraries.

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