Ajax for Web Application Developers

Literal Notation

Literal notation is a more complex way of defining objects with JavaScript and is supported in JavaScript 1.2 and above. This approach is a sort of shorthand way of creating objects, which makes them easy to build but a bit hard to read because of the unique syntax that they require. Here is a sample of creating the same object (with the literal notation approach) we created with the new operator.

employee = {
       id : 001;
       firstName : "Kris";
       lastName : "Hadlock";
       getFullName : function()
       {
           return this.firstName + " " + this.lastName;
       }
}

alert(employee.getFullName); // Results: Kris Hadlock

As you can see, this approach is easy to create, but could be rather hard to manage if we were to add a lot of methods and properties. Don’t ...