Chapter 7. Extending jQuery with custom plugins
This chapter covers
- Why to extend jQuery with custom code
- The rules for effectively extending jQuery
- Writing custom utility functions
- Writing custom wrapper methods
Over the course of the previous chapters, we’ve seen that jQuery gives us a large toolset of useful commands and functions; we’ve also seen that we can easily tie these tools together to give our pages whatever behavior we choose. Sometimes that code follows common patterns we want to use again and again. When such patterns emerge, it makes sense to capture these repeated operations as reusable tools that we can add to our original toolset. In this chapter, we explore how to capture these reusable fragments of code as extensions to jQuery.
But before any of that, let’s discuss why we’d want to pattern our own code as extensions to jQuery in the first place.
If you’ve been paying attention at all while reading through this book, as well as to the code examples presented within it, you undoubtedly have noted that adopting jQuery for use in our pages has a profound effect on how script is written within a page.