JavaScript: What are .extend and .prototype used for?

Question

I am relatively new to JavaScript and keep seeing .extend and .prototype in third party libraries I am using. I thought it had to do with the Prototype javascript library, but I am beginning to think that is not the case. What are these used for?

Answer 1

Javascript's inheritance is prototype based, so you extend the prototypes of objects such as Date, Math, and even your own custom ones.

Date.prototype.lol = function() {
 alert('hi');
};

( new Date ).lol() // alert message

In the snippet above, I define a method for all Date objects ( already existing ones and all new ones ).

extend is usually a high level function that copies the prototype of a new subclass that you want to extend from the base class.

So you can do something like:

extend( Fighter, Human )

And the Fighter constructor/object will inherit the prototype of Human, so if you define methods such as live and die on Human then Fighter will also inherit those.

Answer 2

.extend() is added by many third-party libraries to make it easy to create objects from other objects. See http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.extend/ or http://www.prototypejs.org/api/object/extend for some examples.

.prototype refers to the "template" (if you want to call it that) of an object, so by adding methods to an object's prototype (you see this a lot in libraries to add to String, Date, Math, or even Function) those methods are added to every new instance of that object.

Answer 3

The extend method for example in jQuery or PrototypeJS, copies all properties from the source to the destination object.

Now about the prototype property, it is a member of function objects, it is part of the language core.

Any function can be used as a constructor, to create new object instances. All functions have this prototype property.

When you use the new operator with on a function object, a new object will be created, and it will inherit from its constructor prototype.

For example:

function Foo () {
}
Foo.prototype.bar = true;

var foo = new Foo();

foo.bar; // true
foo instanceof Foo; // true
Foo.prototype.isPrototypeOf(foo); // true