JavaScript naming conventions

Question

I know there is a lot of controversy  maybe not controversy  but arguments at least  about which naming convention is the best for JavaScript   How do you name your variables  functions  objects and such   I   ll leave my own thoughts on this out  as I haven   t been doing JS for long  couple of years  only   and I just got a request to create a document with naming conventions to be used in our projects at work  So I   ve been looking  google-ing  around  and there are so many different opinions   The books I   ve read on JS also use different naming conventions themselves  but they all agree on one bit     Find what suits you  and stick to it     But now that I   ve read so much around  I found that I like some of the other methods a bit better than what I   m used to now

User · Accepted Answer

I follow Douglas Crockford s code conventions for JavaScript   I also use his JSLint tool to validate following those conventions

User · Answer

I think that besides some syntax limitations  the naming conventions reasoning are very much language independent   I mean  the arguments in favor of c style functions and JavaLikeCamelCase could equally well be used the opposite way  it s just that language users tend to follow the language authors   having said that  i think most libraries tend to roughly follow a simplification of Java s CamelCase   I find Douglas Crockford advices tasteful enough for me

User · Answer

One convention I d like to try out is naming static modules with a  the  prefix  Check this out  When I use someone else s module  it s not easy to see how I m supposed to use it  eg   define   Lightbox   function Lightbox      var myLightbox   new Lightbox      not sure whether this is a constructor  non-static  or not   myLightbox show  hello        I m thinking about trying a convention where static modules use  the  to indicate their preexistence  Has anyone seen a better way than this  Would look like this   define   theLightbox   function theLightbox      theLightbox show  hello      since I recognize the  the  convention  I know it s static

User · Answer

You can follow this Google JavaScript Style Guide  In general  use functionNamesLikeThis  variableNamesLikeThis  ClassNamesLikeThis  EnumNamesLikeThis  methodNamesLikeThis  and SYMBOLIC CONSTANTS LIKE THIS   EDIT  See nice collection of JavaScript Style Guides And Beautifiers

User · Answer

That s an individual question that could depend on how you re working  Some people like to put the variable type at the begining of the variable  like  str message   And some people like to use underscore between their words   my message   while others like to separate them with upper-case letters   myMessage     I m often working with huge JavaScript libraries with other people  so functions and variables  except the private variables inside functions  got to start with the service s name to avoid conflicts  as  guestbook message    In short  english  lower-cased  well-organized variable and function names is preferable according to me  The names should describe their existence rather than being short

User · Answer

As Geoff says  what Crockford says is good   The only exception I follow  and have seen widely used  is to use  varname to indicate a jQuery  or whatever library  object   E g    var footer   document getElementById  footer     var  footer       footer

[javascript] JavaScript naming conventions

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