Book Image

jQuery Design Patterns

By : Thodoris Greasidis
Book Image

jQuery Design Patterns

By: Thodoris Greasidis

Overview of this book

jQuery is a feature-rich JavaScript library that makes HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a variety of browsers. With a combination of versatility and extensibility, jQuery has changed the way that millions of people write JavaScript. jQuery solves the problems of DOM manipulation, event detection, AJAX calls, element selection and document queries, element attribute and data management, as well as object management utilities. This book addresses these problems and shows you how to make the best of jQuery through the various design patterns available. The book starts off with a refresher to jQuery and will then take you through the different design patterns such as facade, observer, publisher/subscriber, and so on. We will also go into client-side templating techniques and libraries, as well as some plugin development patterns. Finally, we will look into some best practices that you can use to make the best of jQuery.

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jQuery Design Patterns
Thodoris Greasidis
Feb, 2016 | 246 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
jQuery Design Patterns
jQuery Design Patterns
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
A Refresher on jQuery and the Composite Pattern
A Refresher on jQuery and the Composite Pattern
jQuery and DOM scripting
The Composite Pattern
The Iterator Pattern
Summary
2
The Observer Pattern
The Observer Pattern
Introducing the Observer Pattern
Introducing the Delegated Event Observer Pattern
Summary
3
The Publish/Subscribe Pattern
The Publish/Subscribe Pattern
Introducing the Publish/Subscribe Pattern
How it is adopted by jQuery
Demonstrating a sample use case
Using custom event namespacing
Summary
4
Divide and Conquer with the Module Pattern
Divide and Conquer with the Module Pattern
Modules and Namespaces
The Object Literal Pattern
The Module Pattern
The Revealing Module Pattern
Using ES5 Strict Mode
Introducing ES6 Modules
Using Modules in jQuery applications
Summary
5
The Facade Pattern
The Facade Pattern
Introducing the Facade Pattern
The benefits of this pattern
How it is adopted by jQuery
Using Facades in our applications
Summary
6
The Builder and Factory Patterns
The Builder and Factory Patterns
Introducing the Factory Pattern
Introducing the Builder Pattern
Summary
7
Asynchronous Control Flow Patterns
Asynchronous Control Flow Patterns
Programming with callbacks
Introducing the concept of Promises
Chaining Promises
Summary
8
Mock Object Pattern
Mock Object Pattern
Introducing the Mock Object Pattern
Using Mock Objects in jQuery applications
Summary
9
Client-side Templating
Client-side Templating
Introducing Underscore.js
Introducing Handlebars.js
Retrieving HTML templates asynchronously
Summary
10
Plugin and Widget Development Patterns
Plugin and Widget Development Patterns
Introducing jQuery Plugins
Creating reusable plugins
Using the jQuery Plugin Boilerplate
Choosing a name
Summary
11
Optimization Patterns
Optimization Patterns
Placing scripts near the end of the page
Bundling and minifying resources
Using CDNs
Optimizing common JavaScript code
Writing performant CSS selectors
Writing efficient jQuery code
Lazy Loading Modules
Summary
Index
Index

Chapter 1. A Refresher on jQuery and the Composite Pattern

Until the Web 2.0 era started, the Web was just a document-based media and all it offered was just interconnecting different pages/documents and client-side scripting that was mostly limited to form validation. By 2005, Gmail and Google Maps were released, and JavaScript proved itself as a language used by big enterprises to create large-scale applications and provide rich user interface interactions.

Even though JavaScript has had very few changes since its original release, there was a tremendous change in the expectations that the Enterprise world had about what web pages should be capable of doing. Since then, web developers were required to deliver complex user interactions and, finally, the term "web application" appeared on the market. As a result, it started to become obvious that they should create some code abstractions, define some best practices, and adopt all the applicable Design Patterns that computer science had to offer. The wide adoption of JavaScript for enterprise-grade applications helped the evolution of the language, which with the EcmaScript2015/EcmaScript6 (ES6) specification was expanded in a way that allowed even more Design Patterns to be easily utilized.

In August 2006, the jQuery library was first released by John Resig at http://jquery.com, as an effort to create a convenient API to locate DOM elements. Since then, it has been an integral part of a web developer's toolkit. jQuery in its core uses several Design Patterns and tries to urge their use to the developer through the methods that it provides. The Composite Pattern is one of them and it is exposed to the developer through the very core jQuery() method, which is used for DOM traversal, one of the highlights of the jQuery library.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Have a refresher on DOM scripting using jQuery

  • Introduce the Composite Pattern

  • See how the Composite Pattern is used by jQuery

  • Discuss the gains offered by jQuery over plain JavaScript DOM manipulations

  • Introduce the Iterator Pattern

  • Use the Iterator Pattern in an example application

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