Extending an Ajax Component | August 14th, 2006
Ajax components are not only cool but actually quite useful - and I am not just saying that as a component vendor but as a web application developer. At nitobi we do both consulting and component development and when doing consulting we shy away from actually changing the component source code to do things that we need and instead focus on extending core components.
Since JavaScript is a dynamic language, one can really easily extend functionality. Most notably, many will have at least heard of aspect oriented programming which is the idea of adding before, after, or around advice - which just means running some code before, after or around some predefined method.
Let’s take a look at a quick example. As many already know, classes in JavaScript are defined as functions.
// Define the Dog class
function Dog()
{
this.breed = ‘berner’;
}
// Define the speak method on the Dog class
Dog.prototype.speak = function()
{
alert(’w00f’);
}
That defines a Dog class that has a public property for the dog breed and a public method to make that pooch sing.
So let’s pretend that I am an Ajax component vendor (who knew) and to make my JavaScript load faster I might go ahead and remove the white-space, remove comments, and even replace long variable names with shorter ones. This all happens when I “compile” my JavaScript on my server before I let people access it.
If this were a compiled DLL say, then it would be more problematic to do something like change what the dog says based on the breed of the dog - particularly if this has to be done at runtime rather than compile time. Luckily for us AJAX developers, JavaScript is very flexible 
The first thing that we can do is create a new instance of our Dog class and actually replace the speak method with something completely different.
// Create a new instance of a Dog
var berner = new Dog();
// Re-define the speak method for this instance only
berner.speak = function() {
alert(’I am a Bernese Mountain Dog’);
}
If we wanted to change every new instance of the Dog class we can also change the actual class definition by changing the prototype property just as the original author did.
// Re-define the speak method for the class
Dog.prototype.speak = function()
{
alert(’I am a ‘ + this.breed);
}
Alternatively, we can also add code that will run before or after the speak function. We can define a static function called attachAfter in the aspect namespace that will take an object to which some method belongs (sourceContext), a string that is the name of a method on that object (sourceMethod), and a reference to function object that we want to call after the source method is called (aspectMethod). aspect.attachAfter is pretty simple and looks something like this:
aspect.attachAfter = function(sourceContext, sourceMethod, aspectMethod)
{
var oldMethod = sourceContext[sourceMethod];
sourceContext[sourceMethod] = function()
{
oldMethod.apply(sourceContext, arguments);
aspectMethod.apply(sourceContext, arguments);
}
}
We use the JavaScript apply method here such that we can pass the arguments list that the method is to be called with. To actually use this with our Dog class we could either augment the instance of the class or even the class itself. Here is an example of attaching some function that will alert the breed property of the dog after the dog speaks.
var berner = new Dog();
// This will just alert ‘w00f’ as we expect
berner.speak();
// Now attach an after function to the speak method
aspect.attachAfter(berner, “speak”, function(){alert(’I am a ‘+this.breed)});
// This will now alert ‘w00f’ and then ‘berner’
berner.speak();
Notice that we can even execute the after function in the context of the berner object and therefore we have access to the this keyword in our attached function.
I am going to look at more JavaScript features in the coming weeks including inheritance and dynamic XML parsing. If anyone sees any problems here let me know!
Technorati Tags: ajax, components, javascript, patterns, architecture
. Anyhow, Dre and I just talked about everything that happened in the past coupld weeks including Dre’s findings down at JavaOne, The AJAX Experience, DCamp and NetBeans Day.