Learning JavaScript Design Patterns

Namespacing Patterns

In this section, we’re going to explore patterns for namespacing in JavaScript. Namespaces can be considered a logical grouping of units of code under a unique identifier. The identifier can be referenced in many namespaces, and each identifier can itself contain a hierarchy of its own nested (or sub) namespaces.

In application development, we employ namespaces for a number of important reasons. In JavaScript, they help us avoid collisions with other objects or variables in the global namespace. They’re also extremely useful for helping organize blocks of functionality in a code base so that it can be more easily referenced and used.

Namespacing any serious script or application is critical, as it’s important to safeguard our code from breaking in the event of another script on the page using the same variable or method names we are. With the number of third-party tags regularly injected into pages these days, this can be a common problem we all need to tackle at some point in our careers. As a well-behaved “citizen” of the global namespace, it’s also imperative that we try our best not to prevent other developers’ scripts from executing due to the same issues.

While JavaScript doesn’t really have built-in support for namespaces like other languages, it does have objects and closures which can be used to achieve a similar effect.