'this' in Node modules and IIFEs

For the past 8 months I've been following the convention in Backbone and Underscore and wrapping my modules in an IIFE and setting a local variable root to whatever this is outside the IIFE:

(function () {
  var root = this;
  // body of the module here
}.call(this));

This provides convenient access to the global context in both environments... at least that's what the Backbone docs said and I believed them. So I was surprised when I set properties on root but didn't find them available globally in Node. However, being new to Node, I assumed that this was because Node enforced stricter isolation between modules and that global was really a sort of pseudo-global that was just global to the module. Months later I found that different Isomorphic Javascript frameworks (airBNB/rendr and developmentseed/bones) were setting a boolean on the global object to indicate whether the module is running server-side or client-side... and that the global was actually global.

I had been fooled all this time: the docs were wrong (and were corrected shortly after I read them). this inside a module (and, hence, the root variable) does not refer to the global object in Node; it refers to module.exports. this only refers to the global object when it is inside a IIFE (provided the value of this is not overriden via call() or apply()).

It makes a lot of sense to map both of these (exports and global) to the window object in the browser. The simplest way is to map exports via an argument passed to the IIFE and to map global via a local variable set to this:

(function (exports) {
  var global = this;

  // body of the module here
})(this);

These two variables can then be used for globals, imports and exports:

(function (exports) {
  var global = this;
  var _ = global._ || require("underscore"); // imports
  var is_server = global.is_server;

  function Class1() {
    /* ... */
  }
  function Class2() {
    /* ... */
  }

  // exports
  exports.Class1 = Class1;
  exports.Class2 = Class2;
})(this);

There is still one case where it is necessary to fall back on a typeof check for Node-specific code: when you want to export a single class as the entire module:

(function (exports) {
  var global = this;

  function Class1() {
    /* ... */
  }

  // export Class1 as entire module
  if (typeof module != "undefined") module.exports = Class1;
  else global.Class1 = Class1;
})(this);