Geek Daily

I’ve posted about Dean Edwards‘ Base2 library in the past but I wanted to write a post that brings all the growth Base2 has under gone over the last couple of years into a brief overview of the project so it is easy to see the progress Dean has made and where the project is headed.

In early 2006 Dean Edwards began a little project called Base. This was he first attempt to ease the pain of developing Object Oriented JavaScript.

I want a nice base class for JavaScript OO:

• I want to easily create classes without the MyClass.prototype cruft
• I want method overriding with intuitive access to the overridden method (like Java’s super)
• I want to avoid calling a class’ constructor function during the prototyping phase
• I want to easily add static (class) properties and methods
• I want to achieve the above without resorting to global functions to build prototype chains
• I want to achieve the above without affecting Object.prototype

About one year later Dean released the next iteration, Base2. Although Base was a fairly simple library to use there was no documentation. Other than Dean’s, very helpful, posts on his website there was nothing you could refer to in the traditional reference sense.

In August of 2007 there appeared a nice post on Dean’s site that annouced the arrival of some documentation for Base. Although it is stamped as currently incomplete (at the time of this article anyways) it is a huge boost for the library and the community that has grown around it.

In early 2008 Dean released some improvements for Base2 and some nice code examples further demonstrating what the library can do to make developer’s lives easier.

One thing that, I believe, makes Base stand out, and Dean as an excellent programmer, is his commitment to standards. Base adherse to some fundamental OOP rules, which Dean has outlined in a nice reference guide for library developers.

Base has enjoyed great admiration in the JavaScript community with other libraries using it as a starting point for their library cores.

Thanks Dean for the great leadership you bring to the web development community and keep up the great work.

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