Create Advanced Web Applications With Object-Oriented Techniques

Ray Djajadinata has written an excellent article on MSDN Magazine - May 2007 issue, explaining that with the coming of AJAX we learn that the seemingly simple and easy-to-learn JavaScript is not so. AJAX has shown that most of our JavaScript knowledge is incomplete and inadequate. It is not the same world where you could get by with writing simple JS functions for your client-side (browser) code. With the advent of AJAX applications we get very complex JavaScript code.

Ray gives a primer on JavaScrip Object Orientation and how it is OOP, yet it differs from other OOP implementations we may be familiar with (C++, C#, VB.Net, VFP), where you instance objects based on classes. In JavaScript, there are no classes. JavaScript objects are dictionaries.

In our more familiar languages, objects have different properties and methods, based on the classes they are instantiated from. In JavaScript, objects are just collections of name/value pairs, that is a dictionary with string keys.

See for yourself. Excellent article.

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