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MSDN May 2007

JavaScript

Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques

Ray Djajadinata

This article discusses:

• JavaScript as a prototype-based language

• Object-oriented programming with JavaScript
• Coding tricks with JavaScript
• The future of JavaScript

Contents
Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques....................1
JavaScript Objects Are Dictionaries......................................................................2
JavaScript Functions Are First Class......................................................................3
Constructor Functions but No Classes..................................................................7
Prototypes............................................................................................................9
Static Properties and Methods............................................................................13
Closures..............................................................................................................14
Simulating Private Properties.............................................................................16
Inheriting from Classes.......................................................................................17
Simulating Namespaces.....................................................................................19
Should You Code JavaScript This Way?...............................................................20
Putting It into Perspective..................................................................................21

Recently I interviewed a software developer with five years experience in

developing Web applications. She’d been doing JavaScript for four and a half
years, she rated her JavaScript skill as very good, and—as I found out soon after—
she actually knew very little about JavaScript. I didn’t really blame her for that,
though. JavaScript is funny that way. It’s the language a lot of people (including
myself, until recently!) assume they’re good at, just because they know
C/C++/C# or they have some prior programming experience.

In a way, that assumption is not entirely groundless. It is easy to do simple things

with JavaScript. The barrier to entry is very low; the language is forgiving and
doesn’t require you to know a lot of things before you can start coding in it. Even

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a non-programmer can probably pick it up and write some useful scripts for a
homepage in a matter of hours.
Indeed, until recently, I’d always been able to get by with whatever little
JavaScript I knew, armed only with the MSDN® DHTML reference and my C++/C#
experience. It was only when I started working on real-world AJAX applications
that I realized how inadequate my JavaScript actually was. The complexity and
interactivity of this new generation of Web applications requires a totally different
approach to writing JavaScript code. These are serious JavaScript applications!
The way we’ve been writing our throwaway scripts simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is one popular approach that’s used in many

JavaScript libraries to make a codebase more manageable and maintainable.
JavaScript supports OOP, but it does so in a very different manner from the way
popular Microsoft® .NET Framework compliant languages like C++, C#, or Visual
Basic® do it, so developers who have been working extensively with those
languages may find doing OOP in JavaScript strange and counter-intuitive at first. I
wrote this article to discuss in depth how the JavaScript language really supports
object-oriented programming and how you can use this support to do object-
oriented development effectively in JavaScript. Let’s start by talking about (what
else?) objects.

JavaScript Objects Are Dictionaries

In C++ or C#, when we’re talking about objects, we’re referring to instances of
classes or structs. Objects have different properties and methods, depending on
which templates (that is, classes) they are instantiated from. That’s not the case
with JavaScript objects. In JavaScript, objects are just collections of name/value
pairs—think of a JavaScript object as a dictionary with string keys. We can get and
set the properties of an object using either the familiar "." (dot) operator, or the
"[]" operator, which is typically used when dealing with a dictionary. The following
snippet

var userObject = new Object();

userObject.lastLoginTime = new Date();
alert(userObject.lastLoginTime);

does exactly the same thing as this:

var userObject = {}; // equivalent to new Object()

userObject[“lastLoginTime”] = new Date();
alert(userObject[“lastLoginTime”]);

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We can also define the lastLoginTime property directly within userObject’s

definition like this:

var userObject = { “lastLoginTime”: new Date() };

alert(userObject.lastLoginTime);

Note how similar it is to the C# 3.0 object initializers. Also, those of you familiar
with Python will recognize that the way we instantiate userObject in the second
and third snippets is exactly how we’d specify a dictionary in Python. The only
difference is that a JavaScript object/dictionary only accepts string keys, rather
than hashable objects like a Python dictionary would.

These examples also show how much more malleable JavaScript objects are than
C++ or C# objects. Property lastLoginTime doesn’t have to be declared
beforehand—if userObject doesn’t have a property by that name, it will simply be
added to userObject. This isn’t surprising if you remember that a JavaScript object
is a dictionary—after all, we add new keys (and their respective values) to
dictionaries all the time.

So, there we have object properties. How about object methods? Again, JavaScript
is different from C++/C#. To understand object methods, I first need to take a
closer look at JavaScript functions.

JavaScript Functions Are First Class

In many programming languages, functions and objects are usually considered
two different things. In JavaScript, this distinction is blurred—a JavaScript function
is really an object with executable code associated with it. Consider an ordinary
function like this:

function func(x) {
alert(x);
}
func(“blah”);

This is how we usually define a function in JavaScript. But you can also define the
same function as follows, where you create an anonymous function object, and
assign it to variable func

var func = function(x) {

alert(x);

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};
func(“blah2”);

or even like this, using the Function constructor:

var func = new Function(“x”, “alert(x);”);

func(“blah3”);

This shows that a function is really just an object that supports a function call
operation. That last way of defining a function using the Function constructor is
not commonly used, but it opens up interesting possibilities because, as you may
notice, the body of the function is just a String parameter to the Function
constructor. That means you can construct arbitrary functions at run time.

To demonstrate further that a function is an object, you can set or add properties
to a function, just like you would to any other JavaScript objects:

function sayHi(x) {
alert(“Hi, “ + x + “!”);
}
sayHi.text = “Hello World!”;
sayHi[“text2”] = “Hello World... again.”;

alert(sayHi[“text”]); // displays “Hello World!”

alert(sayHi.text2); // displays “Hello World... again.”

As objects, functions can also be assigned to variables, passed as arguments to

other functions, returned as the values of other functions, stored as properties of
objects or elements of arrays, and so on. Figure 1 provides an example of this.

Figure 1: Functions Are First-Class in JavaScript

// assign an anonymous function to a variable

var greet = function(x) {
alert(“Hello, “ + x);
};
greet(“MSDN readers”);

// passing a function as an argument to another

function square(x) {
return x * x;
}
function operateOn(num, func) {

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return func(num);
}
// displays 256
alert(operateOn(16, square));

// functions as return values

function makeIncrementer() {
return function(x) { return x + 1; };
}
var inc = makeIncrementer();
// displays 8
alert(inc(7));

// functions stored as array elements

var arr = [];
arr[0] = function(x) { return x * x; };
arr[1] = arr[0](2);
arr[2] = arr[0](arr[1]);
arr[3] = arr[0](arr[2]);
// displays 256
alert(arr[3]);

// functions as object properties

var obj = { “toString” : function() { return “This is an object.”; } };
// calls obj.toString()
alert(obj);

With that in mind, adding methods to an object is as easy as choosing a name and
assigning a function to that name. So I define three methods in the object by
assigning anonymous functions to the respective method names:

var myDog = {
“name” : “Spot”,
“bark” : function() { alert(“Woof!”); },
“displayFullName” : function() {
alert(this.name + “ The Alpha Dog”);
},
“chaseMrPostman” : function() {
// implementation beyond the scope of this article
}
};
myDog.displayFullName();
myDog.bark(); // Woof!

The use of the "this" keyword inside the function displayFullName should be
familiar to the C++/C# developers among us—it refers to the object through
which the method is called ( developers who use Visual Basic should find it
familiar, too—it’s called "Me" in Visual Basic). So in the example above, the value

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of "this" in the displayFullName is the myDog object. The value of "this" is not
static, though. Called through a different object, the value of "this" will also
change to point to that object as Figure 2 demonstrates.
Figure 2: "this" Changes as the Object Changes

function displayQuote() {
// the value of “this” will change; depends on
// which object it is called through
alert(this.memorableQuote);
}

var williamShakespeare = {
“memorableQuote”: “It is a wise father that knows his own child.”,
“sayIt” : displayQuote
};

var markTwain = {
“memorableQuote”: “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”,
“sayIt” : displayQuote
};

var oscarWilde = {
“memorableQuote”: “True friends stab you in the front.”
// we can call the function displayQuote
// as a method of oscarWilde without assigning it
// as oscarWilde’s method.
//”sayIt” : displayQuote
};

williamShakespeare.sayIt(); // true, true

markTwain.sayIt(); // he didn’t know where to play golf

// watch this, each function has a method call()

// that allows the function to be called as a
// method of the object passed to call() as an
// argument.
// this line below is equivalent to assigning
// displayQuote to sayIt, and calling oscarWilde.sayIt().
displayQuote.call(oscarWilde); // ouch!

The last line in Figure 2 shows an alternative way of calling a function as a

method of an object. Remember, a function in JavaScript is an object. Every
function object has a method named call, which calls the function as a method of
the first argument. That is, whichever object we pass into call as its first argument
will become the value of "this" in the function invocation. This will be a useful
technique for calling the base class constructor, as we’ll see later.

One thing to remember is never to call functions that contain "this" without an

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owning object. If you do, you will be trampling over the global namespace,
because in that call, "this" will refer to the Global object, and that can really wreak
havoc in your application. For example, below is a script that changes the
behavior of JavaScript’s global function isNaN. Definitely not recommended!

alert(“NaN is NaN: “ + isNaN(NaN));

function x() {
this.isNaN = function() {
return “not anymore!”;
};
}
// alert!!! trampling the Global object!!!
x();

alert(“NaN is NaN: “ + isNaN(NaN));

So we’ve seen ways to create an object, complete with its properties and
methods. But if you notice all the snippets above, the properties and methods are
hardcoded within the object definition itself. What if you need more control over
the object creation? For example, you may need to calculate the values of the
object’s properties based on some parameters. Or you may need to initialize the
object’s properties to the values that you’ll only have at run time. Or you may
need to create more than one instance of the object, which is a very common
requirement.

In C#, we use classes to instantiate object instances. But JavaScript is different

since it doesn’t have classes. Instead, as you’ll see in the next section, you take
advantage of the fact that functions act as constructors when used together with
the "new" operator.

Constructor Functions but No Classes

The strangest thing about JavaScript OOP is that, as noted, JavaScript doesn’t
have classes like C# or C++ does. In C#, when you do something like this:

Dog spot = new Dog();

you get back an object, which is an instance of the class Dog. But in JavaScript
there’s no class to begin with. This closest you can get to a class is by defining a
constructor function like this:

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function DogConstructor(name) {
this.name = name;
this.respondTo = function(name) {
if(this.name == name) {
alert(“Woof”);
}
};
}

var spot = new DogConstructor(“Spot”);

spot.respondTo(“Rover”); // nope
spot.respondTo(“Spot”); // yeah!

OK, so what’s happening here? Ignore the DogConstructor function definition for a
moment and examine this line:

var spot = new DogConstructor(“Spot”);

What the "new" operator does is simple. First, it creates a new empty object.
Then, the function call that immediately follows is executed, with the new empty
object set as the value of "this" within that function. In other words, the line above
with the "new" operator can be thought of as similar to the two lines below:

// create an empty object

var spot = {};
// call the function as a method of the empty object
DogConstructor.call(spot, “Spot”);

As you can see in the body of DogConstructor, invoking this function initializes the
object to which the keyword “this” refers during that invocation. This way, you
have a way of creating a template for objects! Whenever you need to create a
similar object, you call “new” together with the constructor function, and you get
back a fully initialized object as a result. Sounds very similar to a class, doesn’t it?
In fact, usually in JavaScript the name of the constructor function is the name of
the class you’re simulating, so in the example above you can just name the
constructor function Dog:

// Think of this as class Dog

function Dog(name) {
// instance variable
this.name = name;
// instance method? Hmmm...
this.respondTo = function(name) {
if(this.name == name) {

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alert(“Woof”);
}
};
}

var spot = new Dog(“Spot”);

In the Dog definition above, I defined an instance variable called name. Every
object that is created using Dog as its constructor function will have its own copy
of the instance variable name (which, as noted earlier, is just an entry into the
object’s dictionary). This is expected; after all, each object does need its own
copies of instance variables to carry its state. But if you look at the next line,
every instance of Dog also has its own copy of the respondTo method, which is a
waste; you only need one instance of respondTo to be shared among Dog
instances! You can work around the problem by taking the definition of respondTo
outside Dog, like this:

function respondTo() {
// respondTo definition
}

function Dog(name) {
this.name = name;
// attached this function as a method of the object
this.respondTo = respondTo;
}

This way, all instances of Dog (that is, all instances created with the constructor
function Dog) can share just one instance of the method respondTo. But as the
number of methods grow, this becomes harder and harder to maintain. You end
up with a lot of global functions in your codebase, and things only get worse as
you have more and more "classes," especially if their methods have similar
names. There’s a better way to achieve this using the prototype objects, which
are the topic of the next section.

Prototypes
The prototype object is a central concept in object-oriented programming with
JavaScript. The name comes from the idea that in JavaScript, an object is created
as a copy of an existing example (that is, a prototype) object. Any properties and
methods of this prototype object will appear as properties and methods of the
objects created from that prototype’s constructor. You can say that these objects
inherit their properties and methods from their prototype. When you create a new
Dog object like this

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var buddy = new Dog(“Buddy“);

the object referenced by buddy inherits properties and methods from its
prototype, although it’s probably not obvious from just that one line where the
prototype comes from. The prototype of the object buddy comes from a property
of the constructor function (which, in this case, is the function Dog).

In JavaScript, every function has a property named "prototype" that refers to a

prototype object. This prototype object in turn has a property named
"constructor," which refers back to the function itself. It’s sort of a circular
reference; Figure 3 illustrates this cyclic relationship better.

Figure 3: Every Function’s Prototype Has a Constructor Property

Now, when a function (in the example above, Dog) is used to create an object with
the "new" operator, the resulting object will inherit the properties of
Dog.prototype. In Figure 3, you can see that the Dog.prototype object has a
constructor property that points back to the Dog function. Consequently, every
Dog object (that inherits from Dog.prototype) will also appear to have a
constructor property that points back to the Dog function. The code in Figure 4
confirms this. This relationship between constructor function, prototype object,
and the object created with them is depicted in Figure 5.

Figure 4: Objects Appear to Have Their Prototype’s Properties

var spot = new Dog(“Spot”);

// Dog.prototype is the prototype of spot

alert(Dog.prototype.isPrototypeOf(spot));

// spot inherits the constructor property

// from Dog.prototype
alert(spot.constructor == Dog.prototype.constructor);
alert(spot.constructor == Dog);

// But constructor property doesn’t belong

// to spot. The line below displays “false”

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alert(spot.hasOwnProperty(“constructor”));

// The constructor property belongs to Dog.prototype

// The line below displays “true”
alert(Dog.prototype.hasOwnProperty(“constructor”));

Figure 5: Instances Inherit from Their Prototype

Some of you may have noticed the calls to hasOwnProperty and isPrototypeOf
method in Figure 4. Where do these methods come from? They don’t come from
Dog.prototype. In fact, there are other methods like toString, toLocaleString, and
valueOf that we can call on Dog.prototype and instances of Dog, but which don’t
come from Dog.prototype at all. It turns out that just like the .NET Framework has
System.Object, which serves as the ultimate base class for all classes, JavaScript
has Object.prototype, which is the ultimate base prototype for all prototypes. (The
prototype of Object.prototype is null.)

In this example, remember that Dog.prototype is an object. It is created with a call

to the Object constructor function, although it is not visible:

Dog.prototype = new Object();

So just like instances of Dog inherit from Dog.prototype, Dog.prototype inherits

from Object.prototype. This makes all instances of Dog inherit Object.prototype’s
methods and properties as well.

Every JavaScript object inherits a chain of prototypes, all of which terminate with

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Object.prototype. Note that this inheritance you’ve seen so far is inheritance

between live objects. It is different from your usual notion of inheritance, which
happens between classes when they are declared. Consequently, JavaScript
inheritance is much more dynamic. It is done using a simple algorithm, as follows:
when you try to access a property/method of an object, JavaScript checks if that
property/method is defined in that object. If not, then the object’s prototype will
be checked. If not, then that object’s prototype’s prototype will be checked, and
so on, all the way to Object.prototype. Figure 6 illustrates this resolution process.

Figure 6: Resolving toString() Method in the Prototype Chain

The way JavaScript resolves properties access and method calls dynamically has

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some consequences:
• Changes made to a prototype object are immediately visible to the objects
that inherit from it, even after these objects are created.
• If you define a property/method X in an object, a property/method of the
same name will be hidden in that object’s prototype. For instance, you can
override Object.prototype’s toString method by defining a toString method
in Dog.prototype.
• Changes only go in one direction, from prototype to its derived objects, but
not vice versa.
Figure 7 illustrates these consequences. Figure 7 also shows how to solve the
problem of unnecessary method instances as encountered earlier. Instead of
having a separate instance of a function object for every object, you can make the
objects share the method by putting it inside the prototype. In this example, the
getBreed method is shared by rover and spot—until you override the toString
method in spot, anyway. After that, spot has its own version of the getBreed
method, but the rover object and subsequent objects created with new GreatDane
will still share that one instance of the getBreed method defined in the
GreatDane.prototype object.

Figure 7: Inheriting from a Prototype

function GreatDane() { }

var rover = new GreatDane();

var spot = new GreatDane();

GreatDane.prototype.getBreed = function() {
return “Great Dane”;
};

// Works, even though at this point

// rover and spot are already created.
alert(rover.getBreed());

// this hides getBreed() in GreatDane.prototype

spot.getBreed = function() {
return “Little Great Dane”;
};
alert(spot.getBreed());

// but of course, the change to getBreed

// doesn’t propagate back to GreatDane.prototype
// and other objects inheriting from it,
// it only happens in the spot object
alert(rover.getBreed());

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Static Properties and Methods

Sometimes you need properties or methods that are tied to classes instead of
instances—that is, static properties and methods. JavaScript makes this easy,
since functions are objects whose properties and methods can be set as desired.
Since a constructor function represents a class in JavaScript, you can add static
methods and properties to a class simply by setting them in the constructor
function like this:

function DateTime() { }
// set static method now()
DateTime.now = function() {
return new Date();
};

alert(DateTime.now());

The syntax for calling the static methods in JavaScript is virtually identical to how
you’d do it in C#. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since the name of the
constructor function is effectively the name of the class. So you have classes, and
you have public properties/methods, and static properties/methods. What else do
you need? Private members, of course. But JavaScript doesn’t have native support
for private members (nor for protected, for that matter). All properties and
methods of an object are accessible to anyone. There is a way to have private
members in your class, but to do so you first need to understand closures.

Closures
I didn’t learn JavaScript of my own volition. I had to pick it up quickly because I
realized that I was ill-prepared to work on a real-world AJAX application without it.
At first, I felt like I had gone down a few levels in the programmer hierarchy.
(JavaScript! What would my C++ friends say?) But once I got over my initial
resistance, I realized that JavaScript was actually a powerful, expressive, and
compact language. It even boasts features that other, more popular languages
are only beginning to support.

One of JavaScript’s more advanced features is its support for closures, which C#
2.0 supports through its anonymous methods. A closure is a runtime phenomenon
that comes about when an inner function (or in C#, an inner anonymous method)
is bound to the local variables of its outer function. Obviously, it doesn’t make
much sense unless this inner function is somehow made accessible outside the
outer function. An example will make this clearer.

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Let’s say you need to filter a sequence of numbers based on a simple criterion
that only numbers bigger than 100 can pass, while the rest are filtered out. You
can write a function like the one in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Filtering Elements Based on a Predicate

function filter(pred, arr) {

var len = arr.length;
var filtered = []; // shorter version of new Array();
// iterate through every element in the array...
for(var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
var val = arr[i];
// if the element satisfies the predicate let it through
if(pred(val)) {
filtered.push(val);
}
}
return filtered;
}

var someRandomNumbers = [12, 32, 1, 3, 2, 2, 234, 236, 632,7, 8];

var numbersGreaterThan100 = filter(
function(x) { return (x > 100) ? true : false; },
someRandomNumbers);

// displays 234, 236, 632

alert(numbersGreaterThan100);

But now you want to create a different filtering criterion, let’s say this time only
numbers bigger than 300. You can do something like this:

var greaterThan300 = filter(

function(x) { return (x > 300) ? true : false; },
someRandomNumbers);

And then maybe you need to filter numbers that are bigger than 50, 25, 10, 600,
and so on, but then, being the smart person you are, you realize that they’re all
the same predicate, "greater than." Only the number is different. So you can
factor the number out with a function like this

function makeGreaterThanPredicate(lowerBound) {
return function(numberToCheck) {
return (numberToCheck > lowerBound) ? true : false;

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};
}

which lets you do something like this:

var greaterThan10 = makeGreaterThanPredicate(10);

var greaterThan100 = makeGreaterThanPredicate(100);
alert(filter(greaterThan10, someRandomNumbers));
alert(filter(greaterThan100, someRandomNumbers));

Watch the inner anonymous function returned by the function

makeGreaterThanPredicate. That anonymous inner function uses lowerBound,
which is an argument passed to makeGreaterThanPredicate. By the usual rules of
scoping, lowerBound goes out of scope when makeGreaterThanPredicate exits!
But in this case, that inner anonymous function still carries lowerBound with it,
even long after makeGreaterThanPredicate exits. This is what we call closure—
because the inner function closes over the environment (that is, the arguments
and local variables of the outer function) in which it is defined.

Closures may not seem like a big deal at first. But used properly, they open up
interesting new possibilities in the way you can translate your ideas into code.
One of the most interesting uses of closures in JavaScript is to simulate private
variables of a class.

Simulating Private Properties

OK, so let’s see how closures can help in simulating private members. A local
variable in a function is normally not accessible from outside the function. After
the function exits, for all practical purposes that local variable is gone forever.
However, when that local variable is captured by an inner function’s closure, it
lives on. This fact is the key to simulating JavaScript private properties. Consider
the following Person class:

function Person(name, age) {

this.getName = function() { return name; };
this.setName = function(newName) { name = newName; };
this.getAge = function() { return age; };
this.setAge = function(newAge) { age = newAge; };
}

The arguments name and age are local to the constructor function Person. The

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moment Person returns, name and age are supposed to be gone forever.
However, they are captured by the four inner functions that are assigned as
methods of a Person instance, in effect making name and age live on, but only
accessible strictly through these four methods. So you can do this:

var ray = new Person(“Ray”, 31);

alert(ray.getName());
alert(ray.getAge());
ray.setName(“Younger Ray”);
// Instant rejuvenation!
ray.setAge(22);
alert(ray.getName() + “ is now “ + ray.getAge() + “ years old.”);

Private members that don’t get initialized in the constructor can be local variables
of the constructor function, like this:

function Person(name, age) {

var occupation;
this.getOccupation = function() { return occupation; };
this.setOccupation = function(newOcc) { occupation = newOcc; };
// accessors for name and age
}

Note that these private members are slightly different from what we’d expect
from private members in C#. In C#, the public methods of a class can access its
private members. But in JavaScript, the private members are accessible only
through methods that have these private members within their closures (these
methods are usually called privileged methods, since they are different from
ordinary public methods). So within Person’s public methods, you still have to
access a private member through its privileged accessors methods:

Person.prototype.somePublicMethod = function() {
// doesn’t work!
// alert(this.name);
// this one below works
alert(this.getName());
};

Douglas Crockford is widely known as the first person to discover (or perhaps
publish) the technique of using closures to simulate private members. His Web
site, javascript.crockford.com, contains a wealth of information on JavaScript—any
developer interested in JavaScript should check it out.

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Inheriting from Classes

OK, you’ve seen how constructor functions and prototype objects allow you to
simulate classes in JavaScript. You’ve seen that the prototype chain ensures that
all objects have the common methods of Object.prototype. You’ve seen how you
can simulate private members of a class using closures. But something is missing
here. You haven’t seen how you can derive from your class; that’s an everyday
activity in C#. Unfortunately, inheriting from a class in JavaScript is not simply a
matter of typing a colon like in C#; it takes more than that. On the other hand,
JavaScript is so flexible that there are a lot of ways of inheriting from a class.
Let’s say, for example, you have a base class Pet, with one derived class Dog, as
in Figure 9. How do you go about this in JavaScript? The Pet class is easy. You’ve
seen how you can do this:

// class Pet
function Pet(name) {
this.getName = function() { return name; };
this.setName = function(newName) { name =
newName; };
}

Pet.prototype.toString = function() {
return “This pet’s name is: “ + this.getName();
};
// end of class Pet

var parrotty = new Pet(“Parrotty the Parrot”);

alert(parrotty);

Figure 9: Classes

Now what if you want to create a class Dog, which derives from Pet? As you can
see in Figure 9, Dog has an extra property, breed, and it overrides Pet’s toString
method (note that convention for JavaScript is to use camel casing for methods
and properties names, instead of Pascal casing as is recommended with C#).

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Figure 10 shows how it is done.

Figure 10: Deriving from the Pet Class

// class Dog : Pet

// public Dog(string name, string breed)
function Dog(name, breed) {
// think Dog : base(name)
Pet.call(this, name);
this.getBreed = function() { return breed; };
// Breed doesn’t change, obviously! It’s read only.
// this.setBreed = function(newBreed) { name = newName; };
}

// this makes Dog.prototype inherits

// from Pet.prototype
Dog.prototype = new Pet();

// remember that Pet.prototype.constructor

// points to Pet. We want our Dog instances’
// constructor to point to Dog.
Dog.prototype.constructor = Dog;

// Now we override Pet.prototype.toString

Dog.prototype.toString = function() {
return “This dog’s name is: “ + this.getName() +
“, and its breed is: “ + this.getBreed();
};
// end of class Dog

var dog = new Dog(“Buddy”, “Great Dane”);

// test the new toString()
alert(dog);

// Testing instanceof (similar to the is operator)

// (dog is Dog)? yes
alert(dog instanceof Dog);
// (dog is Pet)? yes
alert(dog instanceof Pet);
// (dog is Object)? yes
alert(dog instanceof Object);

The prototype-replacement trick used sets the prototype chain properly, so

instanceof tests work as expected if you were using C#. Also, the privileged
methods still work as expected.

Simulating Namespaces
In C++ and C#, namespaces are used to minimize the probability of name

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collisions. In the .NET Framework, namespaces help differentiate

Microsoft.Build.Task.Message class from System.Messaging.Message, for example.
JavaScript doesn’t have any specific language features to support namespaces,
but it’s easy to simulate a namespace using objects. Let’s say you want to create
a JavaScript library. Instead of defining functions and classes globally, you can
wrap them in a namespace like this:

var MSDNMagNS = {};

MSDNMagNS.Pet = function(name) { // code here };

MSDNMagNS.Pet.prototype.toString = function() { // code };

var pet = new MSDNMagNS.Pet(“Yammer”);

One level of namespace may not be unique, so you can create nested
namespaces:

var MSDNMagNS = {};

// nested namespace “Examples”
MSDNMagNS.Examples = {};

MSDNMagNS.Examples.Pet = function(name) { // code };

MSDNMagNS.Examples.Pet.prototype.toString = function() { // code };

var pet = new MSDNMagNS.Examples.Pet(“Yammer”);

As you can imagine, typing those long nested namespaces can get tiresome
pretty fast. Fortunately, it’s easy for the users of your library to alias your
namespace into something shorter:

// MSDNMagNS.Examples and Pet definition...

// think “using Eg = MSDNMagNS.Examples;”

var Eg = MSDNMagNS.Examples;
var pet = new Eg.Pet(“Yammer”);
alert(pet);

If you take a look at the source code of the Microsoft AJAX Library, you’ll see that
the library’s authors use a similar technique to implement namespaces (take a

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look at the implementation of the static method Type.registerNamespace). See

the sidebar "OOP and ASP.NET AJAX" for more information.

Should You Code JavaScript This Way?

You’ve seen that JavaScript supports object-oriented programming just fine.
Although it was designed as a prototype-based language, it is flexible and
powerful enough to accommodate the class-based programming style that is
typically found in other popular languages. But the question is: should you code
JavaScript this way? Should you code in JavaScript the way you code in C# or
C++, coming up with clever ways to simulate features that aren’t there? Each
programming language is different, and the best practices for one language may
not be the best practices for another.

In JavaScript, you’ve seen that objects inherit from objects (as opposed to classes
inheriting from classes). So it is possible that making a lot of classes using a static
inheritance hierarchy is not the JavaScript way. Maybe, as Douglas Crockford says
in his article "Prototypal Inheritance in JavaScript", the JavaScript way of
programming is to make prototype objects, and use the simple object function
below to make new objects, which inherit from that original object:

function object(o) {
function F() {}
F.prototype = o;
return new F();
}

Then, since objects in JavaScript are malleable, you can easily augment the object
after its creation with new fields and new methods as necessary.

This is all good, but it is undeniable that the majority of developers worldwide are
more familiar with class-based programming. Class-based programming is here to
stay, in fact. According to the upcoming edition 4 of ECMA-262 specification
(ECMA-262 is the official specification for JavaScript), JavaScript 2.0 will have true
classes. So JavaScript is moving towards being a class-based language. However,
it will probably take years for JavaScript 2.0 to reach widespread use. In the
meantime, it’s important to know the current JavaScript well enough to read and
write JavaScript code in both prototype-based style and class-based style.

Putting It into Perspective

With the proliferation of interactive, client-heavy AJAX applications, JavaScript is

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quickly becoming one of the most useful tools in a .NET developer’s arsenal.
However, its prototypal nature may initially surprise developers who are more
used to languages such as C++, C#, or Visual Basic. I have found my JavaScript
journey a rewarding experience, although not entirely without frustration along
the way. If this article can help make your experience smoother, then I’m happy,
for that’s my goal.

Ray Djajadinata is having fun developing AJAX applications in Barclays Capital

Singapore. You can reach Ray at [email protected].

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