Chapter 8. Developing Plugins
The available third-party plugins provide a bevy of options for enhancing our coding experience, but sometimes we need to reach a bit farther. When we write code that could be reused by others, or even just ourselves, we may want to package it up as a new plugin. Fortunately, the process of developing a plugin is not much more involved than writing the code that uses it.
In this chapter, we cover how to create many different kinds of plugins, from the simple to the complex. We'll start with plugins that simply make new global functions available, and move on to cover jQuery object methods of various types. We will also cover jQuery UI's widget factory, a powerful way to create sophisticated plugins without much work.