Daniel Baldwin

Awhile back I posted a video for the “What do you do with Linux” contest and now I’m a lucky finalist. Which is very exciting for me as I really didn’t expect to see my video do very well as there are so many other great video’s up there, I just though I would do it for fun. Now by some stroke of luck I am a finalist and hoping to drum up some more support for my video. So please visit the site at www.howdoyoulinux.com and vote for my video entitled “Web Development in Linux“. Thanks for the support.

So I have been working on a project that needs a reCAPTCHA validation that is a bit customized. Well while I was working on it I had to refresh the page quite a few times and some how it came up with my last name. I am taking that to be a bit creepy, I mean what are the odds of that actually happening it must be really remote. I wonder what it will know next…

I recently had to build a site that ran mainly off of jQuery and I had the whole thing working from one script.js file that just had a lot of functions in it with some global functions defined at the top. The more I looked at this mess of a file the more I felt disappointed with myself that I had allowed myself to code so horribly.

So I went on a mission to turn the entire site into an object. I tried many different ways, including Javascript’s built in prototyping, but nothing seemed to turn out as nicely as I would have hoped. So I had the crazy idea of turning the entire site’s code into a jQuery plugin. Well it has worked out very well and even though it is a it of a wierd thing to do I have taken to making site that use alot of javascript into jQuery plugins.

The problem for me is that what was outlined on the jQuery documentation wasn’t all that helpful and I found that using existing plugins to figure out how the plugins were being built was alot more helpful but also confusing as there seems to be a nearly unlimited amount of ways to make a plugin. So after searching around for a while and a bunch of trial and error this is what I ended up with:

/*** Sample jQuery Plugin*/
 (function($) {
    function Sample() {};

    $.extend(Sample.prototype, {
        settings: {
            base_url: ''
        },

        init: function() {
            this.sampleFunction();
        },

        sampleFunction: function() {
            /* Sample Function Code */
        }
    });
    //Plugin End
    /**	*	Event Handlers	*/
    $(document).ready(function() {
        if ($.sample == undefined) {
            $.sample = new Sample();
        }
        $.sample.init();
    });

})(jQuery);

I find that I like to call the plugin after the site, e.g. jquery.danielbaldwin.js, and I name the function accordingly. I have found that having all the javascript for a site in one object has helped me to build sites that are more complex, can have persistent variables easily, I can set settings that can be changed just by changing a 1 to a 0, and I feel like my code within the object becomes so much cleaner and more legible.