jQuery, MooTools, object inheritance and JSON
I use both MooTools and jQuery in various projects. As I move more towards jQuery, I only use MooTools for its nice type and JSON capabilities. Let’s see how to add this to jQuery.
Class inheritance
As I have decided to drop MooTools, I will no longer have access to the MooTools Object class, where inheritance was implemented like this:
var InheritingClass = Class({
Extends: BaseClass,
initialize: function() {
this.parent("optional parameters");
}
});
I will instead use the jQuery extend function to create a similar inheritance model:
function InheritingClass() {
$.extend(this, new BaseClass("optional parameters"));
};
The MooTools code requires knowledge about the object model, while jQuery only requires developers to know about how to use the extend method. The jQuery example feels better.
JSON encoding/decoding
MooTools has a nice JSON parser and serializer, which I will not be able to use anymore. jQuery has two functions that can be used to handle JSON - parseJSON & serializeArray.
However, the latter only works with DOM elements, so it is not really what I was after.
It seems like the official JavaScript JSON implementation is great, while a jQuery plugin I found had quite an extensive issue list. So, although it makes me depend on yet another 3rd part component, I chose this nice little class, which I have used before.
MooTools is hereby completely replaced with jQuery (and the small JSON class).