jQuery plug-ins provide an excellent way to save time and streamline development, allowing programmers to avoid having to build every component from scratch. But plug-ins are also a wild card that introduce an element of uncertainty into any code base. A good plug-in saves countless development hours; a bad plug-in leads to bug fixes that take longer than actually building the component from scratch. Fortunately, one usually has a number of different plug-ins to choose from. But even if you have only one, figure out whether it's worth using at all. The last thing you want to do is introduce bad code into your code base. The first step is to figure out whether you even need a plug-in. If you don’t, you’ll save yourself both file size and time.
The explosion of JavaScript libraries and frameworks such as jQuery onto the front-end development scene has opened up the power of JavaScript to a far wider audience than ever before. It was born of the need — expressed by a crescendo of screaming by front-end developers who were fast running out of hair to pull out — to improve JavaScript's somewhat primitive API, to make up for the lack of unified implementation across browsers and to make it more compact in its syntax. All of which means that, unless you have some odd grudge against jQuery, those days are gone — you can actually get stuff done now. A script to find all links of a certain CSS class in a document and bind an event to them now requires one line of code, not 10. To power this, jQuery brings to the party its own API, featuring a host of functions, methods and syntactical peculiarities. Some are confused or appear similar to each other but actually differ in some way. This article clears up some of these confusions.You may be interested in the following related posts:Seven JavaScript Things I Wish I Knew Much Earlier In My CareerThe Seven Deadly Sins Of JavaScript ImplementationDeveloping Sites With AJAX: Design Challenges and Common Issues
Thursday, August 26, 2010
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