I like jQuery a lot, but I often find myself re-doing my way of OO and inheritance each time I start a new app. And so, I just did it again of course.

I was starting to write a lame HTML5 game, where you have “AlienModels” (of the MVC, not Star Trek, variety), and each with their own “AlienView”. When an AlienModel enter()s, its view will detect a “enter” event and show the alien entering the scene. Certain types of aliens will fly in, certain aliens will fade in, and so on. I started creating an AlienView abstraction, but I figured this is something jQuery can do for me. An AlienView might simply be a jQuery selector. However, this is where jQuery reaches its limits, as I want to call $(“someAlienView”).enter(50,50), and to have the alien’s entry towards co-ordinate (50,50) animated, but animated differently depending on what kind of alien it is.

So I created a framework to do this. Code and Demo here.

The usage is this: [html]

shy

fly

[/html]

[javascript]

$(".shy").define({ disappear: function() { $(this).slideUp(); } }); $(".fly").define({ disappear: function() { $(this).fadeOut().fadeIn().fadeOut().fadeIn().fadeOut().fadeIn() .animate({top: -200 }).hide(); } }); $(".guy").disappear(); [/javascript]

When we call $(“.guy”).disappear(), what happens depends on whether this is a “.shy” or a “.fly”. This is basic polymorphism, which jQuery lacks. The $.fn.define() plugin I wrote (see the code in that example) shoehorns it in, but maybe that’s not a good idea…I’m making jQuery into something it’s not. So on IRC someone pointed me to this MooTools-jQuery article. I need to read that article. I also need to get into MooTools, which I think may be more appropriate for this kind of thing, with its unashamed use of prototype (afaict). In general, my urge for more OO and scalable architecture tells me I need to look further afield than jQuery. But syntactic sugar trumps all, so I’ll only go elsewhere if it doesn’t smell of enterprisey, false sense of security, public static voidness.

Incidentally $.fn.define() could go further than I currently have it; it would be possible to set up an inheritance chain, where you could define $(“.guy”).disappear() explicitly, so that if an element matched “.guy” but not “.shy” or “.fly”, it would follow the “.guy” rule. (But not the other way round.) I probably won’t though.

Incidentally (2), thanks @agektmr for telling me about jsdo.it, a mostly-Japanese Javascript pastebin similar toas jsBin and jsFiddle.