Sam wrote: > The plugin skeleton shown below is taken from the plugin model overview at: > http://jquery.com/plugins/Authoring/ > That is only one approach. It uses a closure (the "new function() {[code]}()" syntax) to hide variables and functions. You could as well use the second approach mentioned there, avoiding the closure. That maybe easier to understand if you are not familiar with scopes in general and closures in detail. > 1 - I see jQuery coders like to encapsulate code in autonomous functions, but > I haven't read anything about why, and I'm not clear > on why. The benefit would be that locally declared variables aren't > externally visible? That is, wouldn't the following code > perform as well? > The basic idea behind all this "hiding" is to prevent namespace collisions. In other words: You don't want to overwrite other functions or variables and vice-versa, as this could cause serious trouble that is hard to find. To prevent collisions, every plugin author should expose only no more global functions or variables then absolutly necessary. > 2 - The documentation describes the $.myplugin.publicmethod1 as being a > technique for coding "private" functions. > And on a related note, if we like documentation with public/private in the > names to improve the clarity, why isn't > $.fn.mypluginmethod (in 1 above) named $.fn.myPublicMethod? > The names in the example are only choosen to show which functions are public and which are private. The scope is only defined by the context and syntax, not the name itself.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I learned most of this stuff in the last two months myself :-) -- Jörn _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list discuss@jquery.com http://jquery.com/discuss/
