Why I don't love JavaScript's Module Pattern

Why I don't love JavaScript's Module Pattern. Jonathan Snook points out that the module pattern (where private functionality is hidden in a closure and only public methods are revealed to outside scopes) makes code a lot harder to debug. I use the module pattern for pretty much everything, not because I want to keep stuff private but more to avoid any chance of leaking out in to the global namespace. If I need to debug a value I temporarily assign it as a property on the global window object.

Posted 30th April 2009 at 7:59 pm

2 comments

Yeah, I'm a big fan of it too. Private properties and such, sure, but most of all, I find it much easier to do some nice code within the closure at hand then... :-)

Robert Nyman - 1st May 2009 02:31 - #
You can also add this method to the object your Module returns:
```
'get': function(prop) {
    //FIXME: Don't leave this in production code!
    try { 
        return this[prop]();  
    }
    catch (e)  { return eval(prop); }
}
```
As the comment indicates, you do not want to leave this in production code, but it's great for accessing private props and functions.

I started using the module pattern when I switched to jQuery from Prototype and lost function methods like bind() and bindAsEventListener().

James Sevenson - 1st May 2009 03:00 - #

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2 comments