This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
JavaScript Framework
Prototype framework version 1.5 was released in January 2007 and introduced the concepts of object-oriented programming to JavaScript. Prototype framework started out as a small set of functions written in JavaScript to make it easy for developers to write modular code in JavaScript.
Object-oriented programming has been very successful in the rest of the development world, but the JavaScript language does not inherently support the concept of classes, interfaces, inheritance, and polymorphism. JavaScript does, however, have the capability to create objects that may have properties, and it does support the concept of a function pointer. So a clever group of people used those features as building blocks to create a framework in JavaScript that allows developers to use object-oriented concepts to write JavaScript code. For example, you could create a class called Button and have a method in it called click(), and extend the class to create other types of buttons, such as ImageButton, RollOverImageButton, and so on.
The Prototype framework consists of a single JavaScript file that defines various functions that can be used to define custom classes. The Prototype framework now includes support for AJAX by providing some classes to wrap an AJAX request and response object. Figure 2.5 shows the documentation page for General Interface's JavaScript framework, which is loosely based on the Prototype framework.
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Figure 2.5 General Interface framework API documentation.
TIBCO General Interface's JavaScript framework adds a Java-like package structure and organizes the code in class files, interfaces, and packages. This goes a long way toward making JavaScript look and feel like Java. There is even a dynamic class loader in TIBCO General Interface that can download classes as needed. General Interface framework adds functions to signal to the General Interface class loader when another class is required. All JavaScript code is written in smaller classes. Although a single source code file can contain multiple class definitions, it is advisable to keep the files small and define only one class in a single source file. This also helps with dynamic class loading because each class can be loaded quickly when needed. Remember, the classes are in JavaScript files, which live on the server but are used on the client, so class loading is done using an HTTP request. After they are loaded in the client, the JavaScript files are cached by the browser. It would be nice if this could be compiled code and executed much faster than JavaScript on the client side. Also, a compiler would aid at development time. The IDE provided with General Interface offers some assistance in this regard, but it's not really a compiler.
For more details on how to take advantage of the object-oriented approach in the General Interface framework, refer to Chapter 7, "Object-Oriented JavaScript—Extending General Interface Widgets."