Steve Yegge wrote an excellent essay on prototype-based object mapping. It’s of interest to me because my company’s app has had two different half-assed (and differently half-assed) implementations of the prototype pattern, one of which we’ve just removed. We’re using it to model people (well, actually, contact information), but people don’t have just single-valued properties. They have names with multiple parts, and multiple phone numbers (how many people these days have not just a cell phone but a work cell and a personal cell?) and many other complex values, and I’ve been at a loss for a good way to store these. Steve’s essay has helped to convince me that we don’t need to discard the prototype pattern; we just need to get it right for this use.

In the next few days, I hope to blog here about getting it right.