When should I use functions as classes in Javascript?

Question

I wish to create two sets of information that I'm going to re-use, one for a beer and one for a dispenser of beer, in Javascript.

The information is retrieved from an API, and all the beers are objects with an ID, name etc.

I'm wondering if I should bother with making each beer into a function like this:

function Beer() {
   this.Id = 0;
   this.Name = "";
   
   etc.
}

and then instantiate by setting a variable to a new Beer() through a forEach loop on the parsed JSON string. Is it worth it? Or should I just take the information directly from the API every time I reference different information about each beer? In other words, if this is not the time to use functions as pseudo-classes, when is?

If it helps, I'm writing in MVC, so I'm planning on having the information about the beer and the dispenser in my model, so I can use it with the controller and display it in my view very easily.

Answer 1

For performance, function calls in JavaScript are as cheap as a just set of statements. So it won't affect performance significantly.

For simplicy, if all you need from function Beer is to copy properties from a JSON, without adding methods. That's simply not necessary. A more convenient way for parsing/normalizing objects from JSON is just apply a mapping function, like:

let objArray = jsonArray.map(json => ({
    Id: json.Id || 0,
    Name: json.Name
}))