I agree. For small projects I use the same pattern but in the global namespace. I normally also create an intentional closure when initiating the object, this way I can refer to the parent object regardless of whether it's methods have been copied away or not (like when you assign an object method to an event handler)

  var testObject = function()
    {
    // Make sure the 'this' object is always available
    // to the object's methods via the 'thisObj' variable
    var thisObj = this;

    this.publicVar = "This is a string";

    this.alertBox = function()
      {
      alert( thisObj.publicVar );
      }
    }

  object1 = new testObject();

  window.onload = object1.alertBox