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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
jQuery Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing jQuery Plugins


The key concept of jQuery plugins lies in extending the jQuery API by making their functionality accessible as a method on jQuery Composite Collection Objects. A jQuery plugin is simply a function that is defined as a new method on the $.fn object, which is the Prototype Object that every jQuery Collection Object inherits from.

$.fn.simplePlugin101 = function(arg1, arg2/*, ...*/) { 
    // Plugin's implementation... 
};

By defining a method on the $.fn object, we are actually extending the core jQuery API itself, since this makes the method available on all created jQuery Collection Objects from that point onwards. As a result, after a plugin has been loaded in a web page, its functionality is available as a method on every object returned by the $() function:

$('h1').simplePlugin101('test', 1);

The main convention of the jQuery plugin API is that the jQuery Collection Object that the plugin was invoked on is made available to the plugin's method as its execution...