Author: Justin Bezanson

Overview

If you have ever looked at JavaScript as more than just a language for validation and “neat” effects then you know that, despite it’s seemingly simple design, it is a very powerful and complex language. All the frameworks and effects libraries that are being written, like jQuery and ExtJS, are a testament to this fact. Some of the frameworks give you tools for an object oriented (OO) approach to JavaScript. Being a C# programmer I pretty much only code in a OO manner and that just naturally translates into the JavaScript I write.

In this article we are going to take an introductory look at how OO JavaScript works. I am going to assume you are familiar with Object Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts such as encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. If you aren’t familiar with these concepts or would like to refresh your memory you can take a look here. If this sounds like it might be complicated, don’t worry, it really isn’t and I’ll give you lots of example code to show you. Here we go.

Creating a class

The first thing we are going to look at is how to…