ValyJs Why?

New job, new application,new ideas!

After getting the hang of the application I am taking care of I star noticing the same code repeating. And after taking a look at some other web pages I see the same things repeating.

As a fair warning we are talking about javascript here so the work code is and will be used in its widest definition.

function foo(){
  var element = $("elementId");
  if(element != null){
    //do something
  }
}

or the classic one where an anonymous object is passed to a function and they check for each and every member of the object…

function bar(user){
  if(user.name){
    // use the users name
  }
  // dosomething else
  if(user.surname){
    // now it's safe to use the surname
  }
}

And now imagine that a million times over all the files that compose the client site part of the application.

Yes that makes Dejan quite unhappy

So this is where ValyJs comes into play. I would not call it a complete product but I wrote up some helper functions that can aid those common scenarios.

Now you can write it like this.

function foo(){
  valy.executeIfExists({
    elementId : "elementId",
    func : function(element){
      // do your stuff here
    }
  });
}

 

Is this better? I think that it is more readable if nothing else. If nothing else it is consistent.

For the second scenario. We can check for all members up front.

function bar(user){
  valy.exists(user.name);
  valy.exists(user.surname);

  // do your stuff
} 

I to hope that this is better.

There is still a long way to go till I get this to version 1, currently I have it at version 0.1.1 and it is working.

What I need now is some creative input to get something that is actually usable.

So anyway you can go and check it out here: http://code.google.com/p/valjjs/

 

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