The Object Literal Pattern

The Object Literal Pattern is probably the simplest way to wrap all the related parts of an implementation under an umbrella object that works as a Module. The name of this pattern accurately describes the way it is used. The developer just needs to declare a variable and assign an object with all the related parts that need to be encapsulated into this Module.

Let's see how we can create a Module that provides unique integers to a page, in a similar way how jquery.guid does it:

var simpleguid = { 
  guid: 1, 
  init: function() { 
    this.guid = 1; 
  }, 
  increaseCounter: function() { 
    this.guid++; 
    // or simpleguid.guid++;
  }, 
  getNext: function() { 
    var nextGuid = this.guid; 
    this.increaseCounter(); 
    return nextGuid; 
  } 
};

As seen above, a simple rule that you can follow in order to adopt this pattern is to define all the variables and functions that each implementation needs as properties of an object. Our code is reusable and does...