Klaus Komenda takes us through the history of development patterns of JavaScript demonstrating the pros and cons. Taking a typical JavaScript feature he starts with the old-school global functions method and iterates through a Singleton, Module Pattern, Revealing Module Pattern, Custom Objects and Lazy Function Definitions bringing the same feature up-to-date.
Christian Heilmann lays out seven rules to better unobtrusive JavaScript, including not making assumptions about JavaScript, the browser and the document. Work with structured markup. If you are traversing a document, maybe there's a solution that can take advantage of CSS's selector mechanism instead. Work with browsers and users. Better understanding of events, and playing nice with namespace, scope, and patterns. And of course, think about the next developer, so keep the code maintainable.
Eric Miraglia explains Douglas Crockford's Module pattern, a way of creating encapsulated JavaScript functions that offer private and public methods and properties. It uses an anonymous function that returns an object containing our methods, and avoids the big issue of cluttering up the global namespace with global functions. Its based on the Singleton pattern.
Klaus Komenda discusses a number of ways of encapsulating JavaScript functions into objects and namespaces, and shows how to use each pattern. He covers Singletons, Douglas Crockford's Module Pattern and Custom Objects, building the same functionality with each technique.