How do I keep value objects from the server?

I communicate with the server through jsons, which both in Nodejs and in Actionscript are objects (serialized through string).

Those objects I use in my client, by reading / modifying them and also creating secondary objects (from Classes) relative to what came from the server.

I have one of two options to design my client and I am stuck at deciding which of them is more flexible/futureproof.

  1. Keep data as it comes, create many methods to modify the objects, keep secondary objects somewhere separate.
  2. Convert the data into instances of classes where each class has its own group of methods instead of piling the methods in the same place.

Usually I go with 2 because OOP is delicious but going with 1 seems much simpler in terms of quantity.

I guess my problem is that I can't figure out if my client is basically a View (from MVC) where the server is the Control (also from MVC), or if my client and server are two independent / separate projects that communicate, and I should consider the client as a MVC project in itself.

I would appreciate your 2 cents.

From your question it's not clear what 1. and 2. differ but looks like 1. is tightly coupled while 2. has better separation of concerns.

It depends on your application. Do you need to create client heavy app with rich UI/UX elements, or maybe a mobile app where bandwidth is limited? If the answer is yes, then go with a second approach (2.): build your MVC like structure or use existing MV* libraries, like Ember, Angular, Backbone, Knockout, etc.

If you need SEO support and don't have much of fron-end code, then rendering on the server-side is still an option. Even with this approach ORM like Mongoose can come in handy.

PS: JavaScript doesn't really have classes, because objects inherit from other objects. You can use prorotypal inheritance patterns for that.