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Anti-Patterns

If we consider that a pattern represents a best practice, an anti-pattern represents a lesson that has been learned. The term anti-patterns was coined in 1995 by Andrew Koenig in the November C++ Report that year, inspired by the GoF's book Design Patterns. In Koenig’s report, there are two notions of anti-patterns that are presented. Anti-Patterns:

  • Describe a bad solution to a particular problem which resulted in a bad situation occurring
  • Describe how to get out of said situation and how to go from there to a good solution

On this topic, Alexander writes about the difficulties in achieving a good balance between good design structure and good context:

“These notes are about the process of design; the process of inventing physical things which display a new physical order, organization, form, in response to function.…every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem”.

While it’s quite important to be aware of design patterns, it can be equally important to understand anti-patterns. Let us qualify the reason behind this. When creating an application, a project’s life-cycle begins with construction however once you’ve got the initial release done, it needs to be maintained. The quality of a final solution will either be good or bad, depending on the level of skill and time the team have invested in it. Here good and bad are considered in context - a ‘perfect’ design may qualify as an anti-pattern if applied in the wrong context.

The bigger challenges happen after an application has hit production and is ready to go into maintenance mode. A developer working on such a system who hasn’t worked on the application before may introduce a bad design into the project by accident. If said bad practices are created as anti-patterns, they allow developers a means to recognize these in advance so that they can avoid common mistakes that can occur - this is parallel to the way in which design patterns provide us with a way to recognize common techniques that are useful.

To summarize, an anti-pattern is a bad design that is worthy of documenting. Examples of anti-patterns in JavaScript are the following:

  • Polluting the global namespace by defining a large number of variables in the global context
  • Passing strings rather than functions to either setTimeout or setInterval as this triggers the use of eval() internally.
  • Modifying the Object class prototype (this is a particularly bad anti-pattern)
  • Using JavaScript in an inline form as this is inflexible
  • The use of document.write where native DOM alternatives such as document.createElement are more appropriate. document.write has been grossly misused over the years and has quite a few disadvantages including that if it's executed after the page has been loaded it can actually overwrite the page we're on, whilst document.createElement does not. We can see here for a live example of this in action. It also doesn't work with XHTML which is another reason opting for more DOM-friendly methods such as document.createElement is favorable.