How to structure Javascript programs in complex web applications?

Posted by mixedpickles on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by mixedpickles
Published on 2010-03-09T09:25:52Z Indexed on 2010/03/09 9:36 UTC
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Hi there. I have a problem, which is not easily described. I'm writing a web application that makes heavy usage of jquery and ajax calls. Now I don't have experience in designing the architecture for javascript programms, but I realize that my program has not a good structure. I think I have to many identifiers referring to the same (at least more or less) thing.

Let's have an exemplary look at an arbitrary UI widget:

  1. The eventhandlers use DOM elements as parameters. The DOM element represents a widget in the browser.
  2. A lot of times I use jQuery objects (I think they are basically a wrapper around DOM elements) to do something with the widget. Sometimes they are used transiently, sometimes they are stored in a variable for later purposes.
  3. The ajax function calls use strings identifiers for these widgets. They are processed server side.
  4. Beside that I have a widget class whose instances represents a widget. It is instantiated through the new operator.

Now I have somehow four different object identifiers for the same thing, which needs to be kept in sync until the page is loaded anew. This seems not to be a good thing. Any advice?

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