Steve Fenton
Author of The Reason Your Website Sucks

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Wednesday, 3rd February 2010

This is just a quick article to demonstrate a quick bit of JavaScript name-spacing.

Why would you do this? Well, this allows you to put functions and variables inside of an identifier. It acts like a "box of stuff" and prevents variable and function name conflicts. It also supplies a neat way to organise and access your code in logical blocks.

If you're interested, here's how you do it.

Before:

 
var SayHello = function(name) {
    alert("Hello " + name + "!");
}
SayHello("Steve");
 

After:

 
var MyNamespace = function() {
    return {
        SayHello | function(name) {
            alert("Hello " + name + "!");
         }
    };
}();
MyNamespace.SayHello("Steve");
 

Obviously, in this example it's all a bit basic, but if you had JavaScript functions that you'd like to group together, this is a great way to do it - not a genuine name-space, but some distance towards organising your code.