Mastering JavaScript Design Patterns - Second Edition

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Chapter 1. Designing for Fun and Profit

JavaScript is an evolving language that has come a long way from its inception. Possibly more than any other programming language, it has grown and changed with the growth of the World Wide Web. The exploration of how JavaScript can be written using good design principles is the topic of this book. The preface of this book contains a detailed explanation of the sections of the book.

In the first half of this chapter, we'll explore the history of JavaScript and how it came to be the important language that it is today. As JavaScript has evolved and grown in importance, the need to apply rigorous methods to its construction has also grown. Design patterns can be a very useful tool to assist in developing maintainable code. The second half of the chapter will be dedicated to the theory of design patterns. Finally, we'll look briefly at anti-patterns.

The topics in this chapter are as follows:

History of JavaScript

What is a design pattern?

Anti-patterns

The road to JavaScript

We'll never know how language first came into being. Did it slowly evolve from a series of grunts and guttural sounds made during grooming rituals? Perhaps it developed to allow mothers and their offspring to communicate. Both of these are theories, all but impossible to prove. Nobody was around to observe our ancestors during that important period. In fact, the general lack of empirical evidence led the Linguistic Society of Paris to ban further discussions on the topic, seeing it as unsuitable for serious study.

The early days

Fortunately, programming languages have developed in recent history and we've been able to watch them grow and change. JavaScript has one of the more interesting histories of modern programming languages. During what must have been an absolutely frantic 10 days in May of 1995, a programmer at Netscape wrote the foundation for what would grow up to be modern JavaScript.

At the time, Netscape was involved in the first of the browser wars with Microsoft. The vision for Netscape was far grander than simply developing a browser. They wanted to create an entire distributed operating system making use of Sun Microsystems' recently-released Java programming language. Java was a much more modern alternative to the C++ Microsoft was pushing. However, Netscape didn't have an answer to Visual Basic. Visual Basic was an easier to use programming language, which was targeted at developers with less experience. It avoided some of the difficulties around memory management that make C and C++ notoriously difficult to program. Visual Basic also avoided strict typing and overall allowed more leeway. Here is an illustration of the timeline of JavaScript:

Brendan Eich was tasked with developing Netscape repartee to VB. The project was initially codenamed Mocha, but was renamed LiveScript before Netscape 2.0 beta was released. By the time the full release was available, Mocha/LiveScript had been renamed JavaScript to tie it into the Java applet integration. Java Applets were small applications which ran in the browser. They had a different security model from the browser itself and so were limited in how they could interact with both the browser and the local system. It is quite rare to see applets these days, as much of their functionality has become part of the browser. Java was riding a popular wave at the time and any relationship to it was played up.

The name has caused much confusion over the years. JavaScript is a very different language from Java. JavaScript is an interpreted language with loose typing, which runs primarily on the browser. Java is a language that is compiled to bytecode, which is then executed on the Java Virtual Machine. It has applicability in numerous scenarios, from the browser (through the use of Java applets), to the server (Tomcat, JBoss, and so on), to full desktop applications (Eclipse, OpenOffice, and so on). In most laypersons' minds, the confusion remains.

JavaScript turned out to be really quite useful for interacting with the web browser. It was not long until Microsoft had also adopted JavaScript into their Internet Explorer to complement VBScript. The Microsoft implementation was known as JScript.

By late 1996, it was clear that JavaScript was going to be the winning web language for the near future. In order to limit the amount of language deviation between implementations, Sun and Netscape began working with the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) to develop a standard to which future versions of JavaScript would need to comply. The standard was released very quickly (very quickly in terms of how rapidly standards organizations move), in July of 1997. On the off chance that you have not seen enough names yet for JavaScript, the standard version was called ECMAScript, a name which still persists in some circles.

Unfortunately, the standard only specified the very core parts of JavaScript. With the browser wars raging, it was apparent that any vendor that stuck with only the basic implementation of JavaScript would quickly be left behind. At the same time, there was much work going on to establish a standard Document Object Model (DOM) for browsers. The DOM was, in effect, an API for a web page that could be manipulated using JavaScript.

For many years, every JavaScript script would start by attempting to determine the browser on which it was running. This would dictate how to address elements in the DOM, as there were dramatic deviations between each browser. The spaghetti of code that was required to perform simple actions was legendary. I remember reading a year-long 20-part series on developing a Dynamic HTML (DHTML) drop down menu such that it would work on both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. The same functionally can now be achieved with pure CSS without even having to resort to