Project: Analog Clock

Just like before designing an application on the web, we have to think about its visual design, while developing a JavaScript program, things can't really begin until we are ready with a rock solid design to implement.

In the case of an object-oriented JavaScript program, this design stage simply puts forward a generalized plan to implement while developing. We get to know about the classes required, the properties and methods of those classes, how the classes interact with one another, and much more.

After the design, the next step is programming. For intuitive programming, it's imperative to have an intuitive design at hand.

So let's start building up the design for this thing.

To begin with, let's first just think about all the classes we'd need for our clock.

An obvious one is Clock, meant to represent the whole analog clock. Then since a clock consists of three hands, we can have another class ClockHand to represent each of those hands.

It might be really tempting to think that we'd need more classes at this stage such as ClockHoursHand, ClockMinutesHand and ClockSecondsHand to denote one of the hands of the clock, and even classes like ClockGraduation for its graduations. However, that's not the case!

We need to ask ourselves one simple question before creating a given class — is there even a need of the class in the program.

For instance, in a live ticking clock, there is absolutely no need to keep track of every individual graduation (in fact, any graduation at all). What we need is only to keep track of the hands of the clock that have to continuously move with every passing second.

So the outcome of this discussion is that we need two classes Clock and ClockHand for our program.

So with the classes decided, let's now think about their properties and methods. Note that at this stage, we can't always be perfect and come up with literally every method of a given class. Some methods come across us as we develop the program.

Hence, below we'll try to come up with the most basic properties and methods that we could easily think of being needed for the operation of the respective classes.

Starting with Clock.

Here are its properties:

• element — holds the underlying .clock element that can later be used to add the component elements of the clock inside it.
• hoursHand holds a ClockHand instance representing the hours hand.
• minutesHand holds a ClockHand instance representing the minutes hand.
• secondsHand holds a ClockHand instance representing the seconds hand.

And here are its methods:

• startTicking() gets the clock to start ticking. This is more like an on button on a real analog clock.
• tick() contains the real logic to tick the clock with every passing second. It's what moves all the three hands of the clock.
• addElement() adds all the desired elements into the underlying .clock element.

Next, we have ClockHand.

As before, starting with its properties:

• clock — holds a reference to the owner Clock instance.
• element — holds the underlying .clock_hand element for this instance.
• angleIncrement — holds the smallest angle increment of this hand that must be made with every passing second.

Over to the methods of this class:

• update() makes the current hand rotate according to the current time.

And that's it.

This is all that we need in order to power our clock. Now, it's time to finally start the programming.