Refactoring JavaScript

Chapter 8. Refactoring Within a Hierarchy

In the previous two chapters, we saw a large example of refactoring in action. Ultimately, our concern was with the execution of two main actions: training and classifying. It was convenient to write our program as having one main object (a Naive Bayes Classifier), which was also explored as a class and a module.

For this chapter, one object is not enough.

About “CRUD Apps” and Frameworks

As a web application developer, you’d likely spend a lot of time with “CRUD” (create, read, update, delete) applications. That means concentrating on two high-level tasks: organizing data, and presenting that data.

The former is often addressed by database management systems (and your design of the data), while the latter is often handed off to a framework, concerned with the efficient and workable presentation of that data. Database records mix together with some proprietary data, and turn into CSV (comma-separated value) files and styled web pages.

Although we’re not diving into full-stack or presentation frameworks here, it is worth pointing out that they help to avoid a good deal of the problems that refactoring helps to solve. These include:

• One huge file containing all of the code
• One huge (flat) directory containing all of the code
• One huge object or function containing all of the code

As we demonstrated in the previous chapter, extracting functions, objects, and modules can provide some clarity into how the code works. Frameworks, databases, ...