How Do I Mimic Access Modifiers In JavaScript With The Prototype Library?

I've been working with the prototype library for some time now and occasionally find myself wishing I had multiple access levels (public, private, and protected). The closest I've

Solution 1:

How to make a protected member in JavaScript: put an underscore at the start of the name.

Seriously, you're not going to have security boundaries within a JS script that would make real proper protection necessary. Access levels are a trad-OO coder's obsession that make no sense in the context of web scripting. Even if you made real private/protected variables it still wouldn't get you the full encapsulation an effective security boundary would require. JavaScript's ability to fiddle with the prototypes of built-in types your methods will be using gives an attacker the ability to sabotage the methods.

So don't bother try. Just do like the Pythoners do: flag the method as something outsiders shouldn't be calling, and be done with it. If someone uses your code and relies on a member with _ at the start of the name, that's their problem and they have no-one to blame but themselves when their script breaks. Meanwhile you'll make the development and debugging stages easier for yourself by not having strict private and protected members.

Then you can choose per-instance-members (for callback binding convenience) or prototyped members (for efficiency), whether or not you intend them to be private, and you won't trip yourself up on the inconsistency.

Solution 2:

http://www.crockford.com/javascript/private.html

Explains it all...