How to refactor main.js

[Seanny123]

Right now, main.js is big, flat and kind of ugly, despite being delightfully functional. After studying closures and prototypes, which is how OOP is implemented in JavaScript, I'm still a bit confused on how to move forward and have asked the Internet to help me out.

What does everyone think?

[jgosmann]

Can't help a lot here, but maybe you want to take a look at the changes I made in in the Nengo vis branch. Apart from ripping out the editor, it is mostly untouched. But two changes were important as far as I remember:

• nengo/nengo@986ec028314fbb4ae30f10716a153c5761a1ed45 encapsulated the whole file in a function. This prevents pollution of the global name space. Maybe, there are better methods, but to have that code reusable in different contexts something like this should be done.
• nengo/nengo@256ae43cec4e7d3d3315ada9f3eebe4bba392725 reorganized the code to something object like. Again maybe not the best solution, but it makes the code more modular. Different contexts (nengo_gui vs IPython notebook) may require initialization and updates at different points in time.

We might also want to think about where to fix this ...

• Fixing it in nengo_gui would require to port the changes to the Nengo vis branch if we want to share model visualization code.
• Fixing it in the Nengo vis branch requires the branch to be merged to use nengo_gui. Apart from code deduplication it might be helpful that I split the main.js code into the pure visualization component and the editor component. That might make refactoring a bit easier as less code has to be considered at once.