Meme Catcher

I just picked up the 5th edition of David Flanagan’s JavaScript, the Definitive Guide. I find it amusing that that book is the only JavaScript book officially recommended at comp.lang.javascript.

Closures are a powerful feature of JavaScript. However it’s often hard to explain in a few words, just what is useful about closures. Well, here on page 131 of the Rhino book, is the recipe for a unique ID generator that doesn’t require a global counter.

One thing that I personally enjoy about the Flanagan book is that he says things like “don’t pollute the global namespace.” This technique does not pollute the global namespace.

var uid = (
  function(){
    var id=0;
    return function(){
      return id++ ;
    };
  }
)();
//then just say:
alert(uid());

var uid = (function(){var id=0; return function(){return id++ ;};})();
Generate a unique ID!.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Solutions, DHTML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.