Search⌘ K
Home
Courses
Rediscovering JavaScript: ES6, ES7 & ES8

Creating Properties

Let's discuss how to create properties and how they are different from getters and setters.

We'll cover the following...

Now, JavaScript supports C#-style properties. From the caller’s point of view, a property gives an illusion of a field but works as a method. Let’s revisit the Car class we created in the previous lesson and introduce another method that returns a value and then turns it into a property.

Getters

Suppose we want to know how old a car is. The year of make is provided when an instance is created. We use the getAge() method to find the age of the car, like so:

getAge() {
return new Date().getFullYear() - this.year;
}

The method subtracts the year of make from the current year. We invoke this method using the familiar method call syntax:

Javascript (babel-node)
'use strict';
class Car {
  constructor(year) {
    this.year = year;
    this.miles = 0;
  }                
  
  drive(distance) {
    this.miles += distance;
  }
  
  //START:GET
  getAge() {
    return new Date().getFullYear() - this.year;
  }
  //END:GET
}
const car = new Car(2007);
console.log(car.getAge());

That works, but getAge() is a Java-style getter. C# developers write properties instead of getter methods, and JavaScript now provides the same capability. A property may ...