I have been shown a trick - instead of having the data in datafile.json and load it with ajax, the data is encapsulated in a single object in a datafile.js such as var Data = { //all data goes here }. Then the datafile.js is just loaded as external script in the html head
It works well just as if the objects were loaded with ajax, are there any drawbacks to this?
JSON is JavaScript. (Back in the day, the idea was that you could simply eval it ...) Therefore, the file that you speak of is simply ... "a JavaScript assignment-statement, stored in a file."
The only potential issue with storing this as a separate file might be "a timing hole." The source-code must be separately retrieved. I'm not sure if the browser would wait to do that, so it might be possible for other JavaScript code to execute that does not see var Data because that block of code hasn't been retrieved and executed yet.
When you have "lots of invariant fixed data," I customarily put everything including the data into one ("yeah, it's big ...") JS file, so that I know "it's all there" before any of it tries to be executed. Yes, there are definite advantages to simply including fixed data directly into your source-file, as you're effectively doing here, but I'm not sure I see an advantage (and, I might see a hole ...) in using several JS files.
