Plugins // Article Listing

Articles in this category cover both the creation and use of jQuery plugins. Understanding the role jQuery plugins play in site and application development is essential to any jQuery developer wanting to take his code to the next level.

Additional Resources

Create Your First jQuery Plugin Part 2:
Plugin Enhancements with .queue and .trigger

Published on Thu, July 29, 2010 in Multipart Series, Plugins

Note: This is part two in a two part series on creating your first plugin. You can find part one here. In the series we’re creating a plugin to handle displaying, and also queuing a series of a messages.

Plugin Enhancements

The plugin we worked on in Part 1 focused on getting from a simple jQuery snippet to a reusable and scalable plugin. This post will give us an opportunity to look at two popular techniques that can be used in a variety of situations. We’ll introduce these techniques by adding two enhancements to our code. We will enable the queueing of messages for the message center, and will add features to automatically close the message after a certain time period.

Utilizing jQuery Queues

jQuery queues provide an explicit mechanism for running synchronous operations anywhere they might be necessary. Our current plugin is a great fit for queues. If a previous message is being displayed we would prefer that the new message be queued and displayed synchronously afterwards.

The queue portion of the API contains two methods that are used most of the time. .queue is utilized to add items to the queue. It can also be used to determine the number of items currently in a given queue. .dequeue is used to kick off our queue, or at any point move to the next callback in the queue.

Mock Your Ajax Requests with Mockjax for Rapid Development

Published on Thu, July 22, 2010 in AJAX, Patterns, Plugins

Most backend developers are familiar with the concepts of mocking objects or stubbing in methods for unit testing. For those not familiar with mocking, it’s the simulation of an interface or API for testing or integration development purposes. Mocking with front-end development though is still quite new.

Much of the development that appendTo does focuses on front-end development tied to RESTFUL web services. As such we’re able to spec out the service contract and data format at the beginning of a project and develop the front-end interface against mock data while the back end team builds the production services.

I originally developed this plugin for appendTo back in March of this year and our team has been using it in all of our projects since. appendTo is committed to sharing our tools and best practices with the community so it’s with much excitement that we’re releasing this plugin. (A sneak peek was available to the Silicon Valley JavaScript Users Group and those that attended our OSCON tutorial)

Plugin Overview

Abstract: The mockjax plugin is a development and testing tool for intercepting and simulating ajax requests made with jQuery with a minimal impact on changes to production code.

Create Your First jQuery Plugin Part 1:
Transition From Everyday jQuery Code to Base Plugin

Published on Sat, July 17, 2010 in Multipart Series, Plugins
Note: This is the first in a two part series on creating your first plugin. In the series, we’ll create a plugin that will be able to handle displaying and also queuing a series of a messages for the user.

Plugin prerequisites: overcoming myths and challenges

As a enterprise web developer I often found it challenging to shift my mindset from JavaScript coder towards plugin creator. Not that those opportunities weren’t there. Rather, I was stifled by a few factors that many enterprise developers face:

Code ownership and licensing concerns

Writing software that you are planning to release as open source can often conflict with corporate policies. Given that you are already using jQuery, the organization should already have some understanding of licensing policies. Or, at the very least, the organization has some trust in their developers understanding licensing policies.