Sons of JavaScript Collection | this article

You can simulate namespaces as seen in other languages creating JavaScript objects. This will both help structure your application and reduce name collisions.

Creating a company namespace

In order to create the following namespace you can use two notations

MyCompany.MyApp.MyModule.myVariable
MyCompany.MyApp.MyModule.myFunction()

Literal notation

Using this notation first you create the object and then start creating the properties as you go.

var MyCompany = {
    MyApp : {
        MyModule: {
           myVariable: 1,
           myFunction: function() { return 2;}
        }
    }
}
console.log(MyCompany.MyApp.MyModule.myVariable) // 1
console.log(MyCompany.MyApp.MyModule.myFunction())  // 2

Two steps notation

Using this notation you create empty objects and for the last level you use a literal object.

var MyCompany = {};
MyCompany.MyApp = {};
MyCompany.MyApp.MyModule = {
   myVariable: 1,
   myFunction: function() { return 2;}
};
console.log(MyCompany.MyApp.MyModule.myVariable)  // 1
console.log(MyCompany.MyApp.MyModule.myFunction())  // 2

Allowing extensibility

Library developers sometimes need to handle special use-cases. In this case we want to start from a previous object definition (we don't want to worry about scripts order or we want to co-exist with older versions). If you need that behaviour you could change the initial line to

var MyCompany = MyCompany || {};

Taking advantage of falsy objects and JavaScript eager comparision evaluation this code uses a previous definition of MyCompany or creates a new one if MyCompany evaluates to falsy (empty string, the number 0, null, NaN, a boolean false, or undefined).

Sons of JavaScript Collection | this article