You don't have to hard-code explicit dot notation into your code when you're processing JSON or any other hierarchical object serialization format, which is what JSON is.
If you want to make your code more robust, you should process the structure of the JSON document and infer meaning from its keys based upon your position in the tree and of the values of the key names that are meaningful to your application.
This makes it possible to accept any kind of JSON, even if the original format changes, and you won't get uncaught exceptions and your application can decide what to do in a more graceful manner.
You should also centralize the code that is responsible for serializing and deserializing your JSON wire format and creating objects. There's no reason to have ad-hoc code in each object constructor like his example. A good example of such a thing is dnode https://www.npmjs.com/package/dnode. It handles all the JSON abstraction (in this case for RPC) and you don't even need to worry about the JSON ever again.
This has nothing to do with JSON and more to do with poor design and tight coupling of interfaces.
You don't have to hard-code explicit dot notation into your code when you're processing JSON or any other hierarchical object serialization format, which is what JSON is.
If you want to make your code more robust, you should process the structure of the JSON document and infer meaning from its keys based upon your position in the tree and of the values of the key names that are meaningful to your application.
This makes it possible to accept any kind of JSON, even if the original format changes, and you won't get uncaught exceptions and your application can decide what to do in a more graceful manner.
You should also centralize the code that is responsible for serializing and deserializing your JSON wire format and creating objects. There's no reason to have ad-hoc code in each object constructor like his example. A good example of such a thing is dnode https://www.npmjs.com/package/dnode. It handles all the JSON abstraction (in this case for RPC) and you don't even need to worry about the JSON ever again.
This has nothing to do with JSON and more to do with poor design and tight coupling of interfaces.