Book Image

jQuery Plugin Development Beginner's Guide

By : Giulio Bai
Book Image

jQuery Plugin Development Beginner's Guide

By: Giulio Bai

Overview of this book

<p>jQuery is the most famous JavaScript library. If you use jQuery a lot, it can be a good idea to start packaging your code into plugins. A jQuery plugin is simply a way to put your code into a package, which makes it easier to maintain your code and use across different projects. While basic scripting is relatively straightforward, writing plugins can leave people scratching their heads.<br /><br />With this exhaustive guide in hand, you can start building your own plugins in a matter of minutes! This book takes you beyond the basics of jQuery and enables you to take full advantage of jQuery's powerful plugin architecture to deliver highly interactive content to your website viewers.<br /><br />This book contains all the information you need to successfully author your very own jQuery plugin with a particular focus on the practical aspect of design and development. <br /><br />This book will also cover some details of real life plugins and explain their functioning to gain a better understanding of the overall concept of plugin development and jQuery plugin architecture.<br /><br />Different topics regarding plugin development are discussed, and you will learn how to develop many types of add-ons, ranging from media plugins (such as slideshows, video and audio controls, and so on) to various utilities (image pre-loading, handling cookies) and use and applications of jQuery effects and animations (sliding, fading, combined animations) to eventually demonstrate how all of these plugins can be merged and give birth to a new, more complex, and multipurpose script that comes in handy in a lot of situations.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
jQuery 1.4 Plugin Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Summary


Animation plugins are unquestionably useful, though perhaps not much in terms of mere practical utility. However, these plugins provide an interesting addition to the average user interface with little to no effects that we are used to seeing.

However, with the passage of time, over the years, we have witnessed an upward trend in creating very cool interfaces and a number of scripts (developed on some of the most widespread libraries) have been released and made available.

The majority of them are also very easy to use, even for total beginners, leading to the use (sometimes unjustified) of them in nearly every web application.

Most of the animation plugins we will have a chance of analyzing are aimed towards the creation of an "alternative" behavior for those that would otherwise be quite standard elements. For example, the sliding effect is an interesting add-on to the accordion plugin that we have created earlier in this chapter. It adds that fancy twist, which is extremely appreciated...