Object literal

An object is one way of organizing your data in javaScript. It allows you to create once and use many times. For example:

/* Let's say you want to create a way to organize your friends and their car. Instead 
of creating a bunch of separate data    like so: */
var firstName = "Chloe";
var lastName = "Outlander";
var carBrand = "Honda";
var carModel = "Civic";

function getFullName() {
  console.log(firstName + " " +  lastName);
}

function getCar() {
  console.log(carBrand);
} 

// You can organize it into one neat place using objects, like so:
var friends = {
  firstName: "Chloe",
  lastName: "Outlander",
  getFullName() {
    console.log(this.firstName + " " + lastName);
  }
}

var car = {
  carBrand: "Honda",
  carModel: "Civic",
  getCar: function() {
    console.log(this.carBrand);
  }
}

An object literal is one of 4 common ways of creating an object. The example above uses object literal notation to create an object. Another way of creating an object is using the constructor function with the new keyword.

Hi Leon,

An object literal declaration looks like this:

var obj = {
  "property1": "words",
  "property2": "more words"
}

and declares an object with specific properties. Due to prototypal inheritance in Javascript, this is technically an instance of the Object "class", just with extra properties.

A "traditional" object declaration follows the patterns from Object-Oriented languages like Java to explicitly declare a new instance of the Object class:

var obj2 = new Obj();

If we wanted this obj2 to behave like the first one, we'd have to add another two lines with:

obj2.property1 = "words";
obj2.property2 = "more words";

It's a subtle difference, but when it comes time to write complicated Javascript applications, you'll be using inheritance a lot more, and adding/removing properties (especially properties that are functions) will be very important.

Stack Overflow answer

MDN Intro to OO JS

Stephen is close, but a generic literal object would look more like this:

var obj = {
  property1: "words",
  property2: number
}

Property names and numeric or boolean values would not have quotes. When everything is quoted, the item in question is probably a JSON object, which is a special case.

The difference between and object and object literal is similar to an ordinary variable and a literal value. In the case of a literal, the value(s) is(are) supplied in the code when the object/variable is defined.

Thanks for the answers.

Actually I found something useful on wiki:

literals

I can't vouch for the veracity of the article though, as I am still getting to grips with programming.

In the video it would appear that "dice" is the object literal. Simple as that.