Javascript Rant

I've been working on something recently where I decided to have most of the program run in a client's browser. It's basically a blog system that works with that asp- xml-to-access-db class I released on here as an LGPL piece of code. The clients browser sends/requests information in XML to the server script and everything turned out peachy. I'm overall extremely happy with it.

Now that I'm done writing the script. I learned quite a bit more about Javascript that I didn't know in the past. The initial few days of working with it were tragic. I'm not too fond of Javascript's "object" model and lack of a standard class model. While javascript works and provides a good deal of functionality, it feels "dirty." Maybe my fellow "old school" programmers can understand.

Besides the object model, the DOM in general is a pain to work with, and hard to find information about (that works in multiple browsers). Inconsistencies, things that logically should work don't, and, trying ~5 different suggested methods to do something, but finding out that only 1/ 5 seems to actually work.

If you don't agree with me, have you ever tried encapsulating XMLHttpRequest in a "class" object? There are a few gotchas that I stumbled on, which I hope to talk about in the future.

My tip of the day about Javascript: Objects are functions are objects can be variables with no data hiding what-so-ever...