Blog

jQuery, MooTools, object inheritance and JSON

Jun 10, 2010  ·  javascript

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).

Discussions & More

If you found this interesting, please share your thoughts on Bluesky and Mastodon. Make sure to follow to be notified when new content is published.