The jQuery UI widget pattern buils on top of the jQuery plugin pattern. It
codifies some general best practices/conventions, as well as adds some new
pieces. With the widget pattern you get

- init
- defaults
- options
- state
- methods
- enable/disable
- event handling
- destroy (undo/cleanup)

Many of these are handled currently by plugin authors, sometimes in
different ways. So generally a widget will be more complex than a plugin,
but it's also a plugin itself. And everything it does could be written as
just a plugin. Creating it as a widget means you have some lower-level
shared abstraction to take care of init, get/set options, exposing methods,
events, etc.

If you're just going to call it once with an argument or two, better off
with a plugin. If you're creating something the user will see, touch, feel,
interact with, a widget may be a good fit.

- Richard

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Bramus! <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
> (about to do a presentation on UI Widgets at Barcamp Ghent 2 and want
> to have some input on this, just to make sure that I'm not spreading
> out some bollocks into the world ;-))
>
> I was wondering: if I were to write a new functionality to use with
> jQuery, when exactly would I choose to write a plugin and when to
> write a widget?
>
> Take a starrater or a progressbar for example: one could code it as a
> widget, but one could code it as a plugin too. What are the advantages
> of using either one of the methods?
>
> Thanks,
> Bram.
> >
>

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