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.
Tim Huegdon and Mark Aidan Thomas create an elegant wrapper to the YUI Connection Manager that manages repeating Ajax JSON requests. Tim describes the use of Custom Events, and the use of the Observer design pattern, dissects the code and offers a tidy demonstration of the working code. This simplifies JSON requests into declaring a simple function to process the returned JSON object, and a single line to fire off the request (within a setInterval if required)