What I Wish I had Picked up in Introduction to JavaScript
I’ve been doing JavaScript for a few years, quite a few actually. I learned JavaScript back in the 1990s from the masters who were concerned with rocking the image swaps, scrolling banners, and onSubmit event handlers. This was a great time when the bulk of JavaScript for a page fit on a single editor page and browser inconsistencies were primarily handled by not using a particular feature.
The world changed. JavaScript is extremely popular (and powerful!). This language enables all kinds of coolness that abounds on the dynamic web today. A scan of the most popular sites will see a vast array of tricks that to the developer’s eye will stand out as a fantastic bit of code. The modern web app is usually an aggregation of 3 distinct languages (yes, you need them all): HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Of the three, JavaScript can often be the trickiest.
Var Keyword
The var keyword in JavaScript was often taught as syntactical sugar, optional. It is not. As your code base of JavaScript explodes, the nuances of the var keyword become quite important! I am still amazed how often a JavaScript developer misunderstands the importance of good style and good habits when it comes to var. The var keyword scopes a variable. Two scopes are commonly defined, global and local.
Global scope are all those variables that are defined at the top level of your code.
<script language="javascript">
var msg="Global scoped variable";
</script>
The msg variable above is available everywhere in the page. The global scope is incredibly powerful for sharing variables around (remember, variables point to things: values, functions, and objects objects). The danger that everyone speaks about is the pollution of that namespace. There is only one global scope, and once you add a variable to that scope, another definition of that variable in the global scope is a collision.
Local scope is a set of variables that are available within a smaller set of code lines – generally a top-level function. Variables defined within a local scope are available to that narrower scope, but not the outer scopes.
<script language="javascript">
var msg="Global scoped variable";
var sayMessage = function(){
var innermsg = "Inner-scoped variable";
console.log(innermsg);
}
sayMessage();
console.log(innermsg); //The variable is not visible here.
</script>
Variables are defined with the var keyword, which places them in a scope. Assigning a value to a variable without the var keyword implicitly creates the variable in the global scope. Did you catch that? That is a really important concept! JavaScript will implicitly add your new variable to the global scope if you forget the var keyword.
<script language="JavaScript">
var msg="Global scoped variable";
var sayMessage = function(){
innermsg = "Inner-scoped variable"; //Oops! Missed the var keyword!
console.log(innermsg);
}
sayMessage();
console.log(innermsg); //The variable is now visible!
</script>
JavaScript is exploding on our pages. It is not unheard of to have hundreds (or thousands) of lines of JavaScript on a page. A very simple practice of using var to declare your variables will save you hours of painful JavaScript debugging!!
Keep an eye out for a few more articles that will dive much deeper into the “Why” and patterns around this scoping topic.
Todd is a Java developer and trainer specializing in Enterprise Java Technology (J2EE), Perl, and XML related software. Todd is a published author of several software development and design technical training books.
