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

Chapter 3. Our First jQuery Plugin

Now that we have got some first experiences dealing with plugins, we'll start off with our plugin creation adventure.

From now on, each chapter will cover a specific topic related to plugin creation, meaning each chapter will be focused on developing a particular type of plugin (that is, media plugins, form-related ones, and so on).

The current chapter, however, deals with the correct creation of a plugin of any sort, to sort things out and make clear, once and for all, the basic outline of a plugin and what is fundamental for successfully developing a plugin from scratch.

This chapter will be about the following topics:

  • Defining our own default plugin structure

  • Setting the basics for our first plugin

  • Getting a step farther

  • Dealing with options

  • Using functions inside the plugin

  • Closures: making functions private