Build Your First JavaScript Library
Ever marvelled at the magic of Mootools? Ever wondered how Dojo does it? Ever been curious about jQuery’s gymnastics? In this tutorial, we’re going to sneak behind the scenes and try our hand at building a super-simple version of your favorite library.
We use JavaScript libraries nearly every day. When you’re just getting started, having something like jQuery is fantastic, mainly because of the DOM. First, the DOM can be rather rough to wrangle for a beginner; it’s a pretty poor excuse for an API. Secondly, it’s not even consistent across all browsers.
We’re wrapping the elements in an object because we want to be able to create methods for the object.
In this tutorial, we’re going to take a (decidedly shallow) stab at building one of these libraries from scratch. Yes, it’ll be fun, but before you get too excited, let me clarify a few points:
- This won’t be a completely full-featured library. Oh, we’ve got a solid set of methods to write, but it’s no jQuery. We’ll do enough to give you a good feeling for the kind of problems that you’ll run into when building libraries.
- We aren’t going for complete browser compatibility across the board here. What we’re writing today should work on Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 5+, Opera 10+, Chrome, and Safari.
- We aren’t going to cover every possible use of our library. For example, our append and prepend methods will only work if you pass them an instance of our library; they won’t work with raw DOM nodes or nodelists.
Source: net.tutsplus.com
