Klaus Komenda takes us through the history of development patterns of JavaScript demonstrating the pros and cons. Taking a typical JavaScript feature he starts with the old-school global functions method and iterates through a Singleton, Module Pattern, Revealing Module Pattern, Custom Objects and Lazy Function Definitions bringing the same feature up-to-date.
Christian Heilmann compares the Object Literal to Douglas Crockford's Module pattern and finds that the Module pattern fixes a major problem of the object literal - the difficult choice of using this or fully qualified references to functions in the same block. Christian also covers the improvements in the Module Pattern, like the decluttering of the return block, which makes the resulting a little easier to work with.