Question

I find this pattern all over the ExtJS source code.

method: function() {
  var me = this;
  ...
  me.someOtherMethod();
}

Why don’t they just use this? Is there some advantage to always often defining me (outside of not having to type 2 characters)? I can understand if they are trying to maintain the context via closure, but it’s done in places where there is no closure at all.

An example from Ext.panel.Panel:

disable: function(silent) {
    var me = this;

    if (me.rendered) {
        me.el.addCls(me.disabledCls);
        me.el.dom.disabled = true;
        me.onDisable();
    }

    me.disabled = true;

    if (silent !== true) {
        me.fireEvent('disable', me);
    }

    return me;
},

Answer 1

One reason is because with minification, me can become much shorter than this.