The third-party plug-ins available provide a bevy of options for enhancing our coding experience, but sometimes we need to reach a bit farther. When we write code that could be reused by others, or even ourselves, we may want to package it up as a new plug-in. Fortunately, this process is not much more involved than writing the code itself.
Some of the built-in capabilities of jQuery are provided via what we have been calling global functions. As we’ve seen, these are actually methods of the jQuery object, but practically speaking, they are functions within a jQuery namespace.
A prime example of this technique is the $.ajax function. Everything that $.ajax() does could be accomplished with a regular global function called simply ajax(), but this approach would leave us open for function name conflicts. By placing the function within the jQuery namespace, we only have to worry about conflicts with other jQuery methods.
To add a function to the...