Question

I’m writing a lot of JavaScript widgets and small apps using the Object Literal pattern.

One thing I do is inside one of the methods I will abbreviate the application name to “app.”

I do this primarily because it’s easier to write, and also I understand there is a small performance gain.

    var ApplicationName = {
       property : "foo",
       methodOne : function(){
          var app = ApplicationName;
          return app.property;
       },
       init: function(){
          var app = ApplicationName;
          app.methodOne();
       }
    }
ApplicationName.init();

Are there any issues with this approach?

Answer 1

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your approach, but it’s not strictly necessary (and you can shorten it even further). Calling init like this:

ApplicationName.init()

…sets the value of this inside init to ApplicationName. Which allows you to do this:

var ApplicationName = {
    property : "foo",
    methodOne : function(){
        return this.property;
    },
    init: function(){
        return this.methodOne();
    }
}