jQuery, MooTools, object inheritance and JSON
I use both MooTools and jQuery in various projects. As I now have started moving more towards jQuery, I only use MooTools for its nice type and json capabilities. Let’s look at how to implement this in 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 example requires knowledge about the object model, while the jQuery example only requires developers to know about how to use the extend method. The jQuery example feels better.
JSON encoding/decoding
MooTools features a nice JSON parser and serializer, which I will not be able to
use anymore. jQuery contains (at least) two functions that can be used to handle
JSON - parseJSON and serializeArray. However, the latter only works with DOM
elements, so it is not really what I was after.
After some reading, it seems like the official JSON JavaScript implementation is the best around, while a jQuery plugin that 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).