Question

I’m curious what the difference is between the following OOP javascript techniques. They seem to end up doing the same thing but is one considered better than the other?

function Book(title) {
    this.title = title;
}

Book.prototype.getTitle = function () {
    return this.title;
};

var myBook = new Book('War and Peace');
alert(myBook.getTitle())

vs

function Book(title) {
    var book = {
        title: title
    };
    book.getTitle = function () {
        return this.title;
    };
    return book;
}

var myBook = Book('War and Peace');
alert(myBook.getTitle())

Answer 1

The second one doesn’t really create an instance, it simply returns an object. That means you can’t take advantage of operators like instanceof. Eg. with the first case you can do if (myBook instanceof Book) to check if the variable is a type of Book, while with the second example this would fail.

If you want to specify your object methods in the constructor, this is the proper way to do it:

function Book(title) {
    this.title = title;

    this.getTitle = function () {
        return this.title;
    };
}

var myBook = new Book('War and Peace');
alert(myBook.getTitle())

While in this example the both behave the exact same way, there are differences. With closure-based implementation you can have private variables and methods (just don’t expose them in the this object). So you can do something such as:

function Book(title) {
    var title_;

    this.getTitle = function() {
        return title_;
    };

    this.setTitle = function(title) {
        title_ = title;
    };

    // should use the setter in case it does something else than just assign
    this.setTitle(title);
}

Code outside of the Book function can not access the member variable directly, they have to use the accessors.

Other big difference is performance; Prototype based classing is usually much faster, due to some overhead included in using closures. You can read about the performance differences in this article: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kristoffer/archive/2007/02/13/javascript-prototype-versus-closure-execution-speed.aspx