SweetVision Javascript and other web programming topics

jQuery is object oriented

When I first looked at the jQuery frame work, a few years ago I immediately discounted it as a viable framework. My whole reason for that decision was that it did not add a traditional class based object oriented layer. A little more than a year later I started reading about jQuery’s speed and small size. I decided that I would give it a full chance and start using it on a few projects. I found many advantages to jQuery but was still turned off by its apparent lack of object oriented features. I wrote a blog post to that affect and the response was rather vehement as many took my statement that “you should not choose jQuery if you wanted an object oriented framework,” to be a condemnation of jQuery. Some statements though were rather enlightening, specifically ones that pointed out that JavaScript is all ready object oriented and does not need a framework to make it so.

That last point was interesting as I all ready knew that JavaScript was an object oriented language, but since it did not do objects like I learned to do them in C++ and PHP it sort of slid under my obvious filter. Suddenly I realized I need to look into how JavaScript was object oriented, started learning about Prototype-based programming, and learn how JavaScript uses it. This began a cascade of shifting thought about how to program in JavaScript and how to use jQuery. So now I am exploring how to create objects in a JavaScript centric way and how to do object oriented jQuery development.

Some things to take away from this little post is that JavaScript is object orented, JavaScript is a prototype based language and jQuery is a prototype centric JavaScript library.

This is part of my ongoing series of posts exploring the use of jQuery and object oriented JavaScripts, you might be interested in these posts as well:

• How to use object oriented programming with jQuery
• jQuery makes me go hmmm