A lot of PHP frameworks have something called “collections” (though, I’m sure some of them use a different term). Basically, these are special classes whose sole purpose is to hold a bunch of the same type of objects within them. They usually provide some extra functions for working with those objects and also a bit of data protection by making the contained objects themselves private or otherwise unavailable. A lot of this intrinsic functionality is provided by using magic methods.

Javascript is inherently a classless object-oriented language, so performing a lot of the things we’re used to in say, PHP, doesn’t work the same way. This doesn’t mean that these things are impossible though. In fact, Javascript is extremely open-ended and very fluid in how it implements OOP. So what if we need to extend the existing functionality of a function of an object, effectively replicating method inheritance?

I have found that time and time again, having good logging can be one of the most essential tools for developing and/or debugging something. It gives you a better insight into what is actually happening in your program. It lets you keep a history of how your program has been performing. It can give valuable debugging data in live environments where editing the code is generally a bad idea. Because of all of this, I try to log as much as I can.

One of the easiest things to do for logging is to simply log every function and/or method call. I’ll leave the details of creating an actual logging system for another time, but this often means going into each and every one of your method calls and adding something like Debug::log(); at the very least. Obviously, this can get very tedious and makes it very easy to simply forget to add in your logging call.