Jonathan Snook has a nice write-up about using private methods in javascript.

With JavaScript, you can create private methods and properties using what Yahoo describes as the module pattern. Here’s the basic construct, including a private method:

MyObject = function(){

  var privateMethod = function(){ /* do stuff */ };

  var obj = {
    publicProperty:5,
    publicMethod:function(){ /* do stuff */ };
  };

  return obj;
}(); // run it right away

If you’re not familiar with this pattern, it’s really quite cool. It takes advantage of closures, allowing the public methods to access the private methods. I’ve been using this approach in my recent work and it feels nice and works well.

Bas Wenneker has a nice little article over at solutoire.com on sorting javascript arrays. The docs over at Mozilla on Array.sort demonstrate the same stuff, but Bas’s article is a quick read that’s worth it if you ever see yourself working with data this way.

objectArray.sort(callbackFunc);

/**
 * After sorting the objectArray will be like this:
 * [
 * 	{firstname: 'Will', 	lastname: 'Brown',	age: 28},
 * 	{firstname: 'John', 	lastname: 'Doe',	age: 25},
 * 	{firstname: 'Marie', 	lastname: 'Doe',	age: 28},
 * 	{firstname: 'Sarah', 	lastname: 'Doe',	age: 25},
 * 	{firstname: 'James', 	lastname: 'White',	age: 28},
 * 	{firstname: 'George', 	lastname: 'Williams',	age: 25}
 * ]
 */

UPDATE: This code is now in the plugins directory of the mootools library as Hash.Cookie.

Over on Ajaxian there was a recent post about a little Prototype.js dependent class called CookieJar.

Lalit Patel has created a JavaScript Library to use JSON to store data in cookies. JSON Cookies is built on top of Prototype and gives you a simple API to put and get JSON values into cookies

I liked the idea, so I wrote a version for Mootools. The Mootools version is a little different and adds some functionality (for merging data) and it stores its info a little differently, but it’s basically the same concept. Read the rest of this entry »

I added large close and confirm buttons to the default stickyWinHTML layout. You can make them read whatever you want and you can assign callback functions to them getting clicked. They are optional, and not visible by default. Note the section in the link above about how the onClose event is NOT the same as the onClose event for StickyWin.

That little “x” for closing the StickyWin is pretty small, and on pages like in our CMS, I think an easier to click close button would make it easier to deal with these things, especially if you end up opening them often. If you don’t specify a closeTxt or confirmTxt value, the buttons are not there. The callbacks are not required. Example:

new StickyWin({
  content: stickyWinHTML('the caption', 'this is the body', {
    width: '400px',
    closeTxt: 'close',
    confirmTxt: 'okey-dokey',
    onClose: function(){alert('closed!')},
    onConfirm: function(){alert('confirmed')}
})});

Over at Ajaxian today they have a post on miniajax.com which describes itself as “a showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and Ajax scripts”.

I’m not sure if they authored these scripts or if they just collected them all into slick looking examples. Some of the items link to other sites, but some they seem to host.

Some of these things I think would do well to write as plugins for the Mootools library but if Valerio (the gatekeeper for Mootools) doesn’t want it I think some of them would do well to be added to the CNET Library.

This goes hand-in-hand with the patterns project that we’re trying to kick off here. I think this page could really help inform that work…