Book Image

jQuery Design Patterns

By : Greasidis
Book Image

jQuery Design Patterns

By: 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.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Writing efficient jQuery code


Let's now proceed and analyze the most important jQuery-specific performance tips. For more information about the most up-to-date performance tips on jQuery, keep an eye on the relevant page for jQuery's Learning Center: http://learn.jquery.com/performance

Minimizing DOM traversals

Since jQuery made DOM traversals so simple, many web developers overused the $() function everywhere, even in subsequent lines of code, making their implementations slower by executing unnecessary code. One of the main reasons that the complexity of the operation is so often overlooked is the elegant and minimalistic syntax that jQuery uses. Despite the fact that JavaScript browser engines became many times faster in the last few years, with performance comparable to many compiled languages, the DOM API is still one of their slowest components and, as a result, developers have to minimize their interactions with it.

Caching jQuery objects

Storing the result of the $() function to a local...