A.I on the 1s and 0s

Part 1 - Object Oriented JavaScript (Using MS AJAX)

I recently gave a presentation on Object Oriented JavaScript (OOJ) and received some good feedback so the next few posts will be a more verbose version of that presentation.

AGENDA

Part 1 – JavaScript Review
Part 2 – How
Part 3 – Why Use OOJ?
Part 4 – Example

 Part 1 – JavaScript Review

Before we get to the good stuff I want to review the basic fundamentals of JavaScript which we will build on in Part 2.

JavaScript Objects

Believe it or not, JavaScript is a true object oriented language. However, objects in JavaScript are different than objects in C# because JavaScript doesn’t have classes which means you can’t create an instance of a class like you would in C#. Instead you need to manipulate the native Prototype object which can be though of as a template. The Prototype object will be discussed in detail a little later. So what is a JavaScript object? Put simply, a JavaScript object is no more than a collection of name/value pairs.

You can create a JavaScript object by using:  

var person = new Object();

JavaScript Properties

JavaScript properties can be added at any time unlike C# where all properties are defined in the class. Properties can be added by using:

person.name = 'Alnur Ismail';

person['gender'] = male;

JavaScript Functions

In JS functions are first class objects. This is a fancy way of saying they can do everything regular objects can do such as being: instantiated, returned by other functions, stored as elements of arrays and assigned to variables. The latter, also referred to as an anonymous function, is important to understand when it comes to OOJ because when a function is assigned to a variable there is no way of getting to that function without knowing the property name. More on this later.

That’s all you really need to know about JavaScript to take advantage of OOJ. I’ll discuss the “how” of OOJ in Part 2.