Ben Alman » News

jQuery throttle / debounce v1.1

Ben Alman — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:50:28 -0800

While this plugin was initially one of my jQuery Misc plugins, it seemed useful enough to “promote” to its own project page. Congratulations jQuery throttle / debounce, you’ve “made it big!”

That being said, jQuery throttle / debounce allows you to rate-limit your functions in multiple useful ways. Passing a delay and callback to $.throttle returns a new function that will execute no more than once every delay milliseconds. Passing a delay and callback to $.debounce returns a new function that will execute only once, coalescing multiple sequential calls into a single execution at either the very beginning or end.

Just take a look at the project page to see more explanations (both textual and visual), documentation and working examples!

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please leave them in the comments, and if you find this plugin useful, please donate!

There's no such thing as a "JSON Object"

Ben Alman — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:54:49 -0800

I want to clear up a common misconception. It’s my belief that developers mistakenly call JavaScript Object literals “JSON Objects” because their syntax is identical to what is described in the JSON specification, but what the specification fails to mention explicitly is that since JSON is a “data-interchange language,” it’s only actually JSON when it’s used in a string context.

jQuery doTimeout v1.0

Ben Alman — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 05:09:42 -0800

I haven’t had a reason to update jQuery doTimeout in a long time, mainly because nobody has had any suggestions on how to improve it.. until last night, when Brandon Aaron suggested that, “hey, wouldn’t be great if doTimeout could be called like this: $('div').show().doTimeout( 2000, 'hide' ), passing a string jQuery method name instead of a function reference?”

Well, it seemed like a great idea to me, so I took a look at the plugin, spent about fifteen minutes adding four lines of code.. and then spent another few hours updating documentation, examples, and unit tests.

The end result is version 1.0, which makes it even easier for people to delay execution of their jQuery methods. Just take a look at the first hover intent example to get an idea of how easy it is now!

jQuery clickoutside event v1.0

Ben Alman — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:19:07 -0800

With jQuery clickoutside event you can bind an event that will be triggered only when the user clicks outside the element in question. And because a reference to the clicked element is available as event.target you can change behavior based on what element is clicked.

This a fairly simple example of a jQuery “special event” plugin, so if you want to write one of your own, feel free to take a look at the fully commented source code. If you just want to, like, actually use the plugin, check out the project page!

On licensing my code

Ben Alman — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:00:25 -0800

When I initially started releasing jQuery plugins, I asked a number of my peers how I should license them. I was already using a Creative Commons license for my photography and text, but I had read that it wasn’t recommended for software. The most common suggestion was to use the MIT license, which I really liked because it is concise, establishes that I own the copyright, that the software in question is free, and that no warranty is provided.

You might not be thinking about this now, but it’s never a bad idea to state somewhere that this hard work, that you’re doing free of charge because you love open source, is provided as-is, without any kind of warranty. I’m not saying that anyone is going to hold you liable and take you to court because your code broke in production due to some wacky bug, costing them thousands of dollars.. but you’re better safe than sorry, right?

Either way, the MIT license allows people to pretty much use your code however they want, in a free or commercial product, as long as they keep your copyright notice intact.

So, that’s it, right? Well, that’s actually only half the story…

jQuery BBQ v1.2.1

Ben Alman — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:33:17 -0800

This jQuery BBQ release incorporates the recently-updated jQuery hashchange event v1.2 which fixed a bizarre bug in Safari, and a few other miscellaneous things:

The IE6/7 Iframe is now inserted after the body (this actually works), which prevents the page from scrolling when the event is first bound.
The event can also now be bound before DOM ready, but it won’t be usable before then in IE6/7. Meaning: you can do it, but be warned!

In addition, I:

Added the $.param.fragment.noEscape method, which allows designating characters to not be urlencoded in the hash, which can result in prettier-looking URLs.
Reworked the hashchange event internal “add” method to be compatible with changes made to the jQuery 1.4.2 special events API.
Unit-tested the plugin in jQuery 1.3.2, 1.4.1, and 1.4.2… and everything works!

Also, since the special events API in jQuery 1.4.2 has been reworked (fixing some serious issues), I recommend that you update to jQuery 1.4.2 as soon as possible. Keep in mind that jQuery BBQ prior to v1.2.1 will not be fully compatible with jQuery 1.4.2, because of the aforementioned API changes, so I recommend upgrading both BBQ and jQuery to the latest versions!

So, what are you waiting for, get the latest and greatest now!

Note: this post was originally for BBQ v1.2, but since it’s only been a few hours and I’ve already released BBQ v1.2.1, I’m just going to edit this existing post and hope that nobody notices. Except that I’m explicitly commenting about it in the post. Damn, you’ve found me out.

Seven small jQuery plugins

Ben Alman — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:58:56 -0800

This morning, I decided to actually collect many of the little jQuery plugins I’ve created, that are too small for their own pages, into a single jQuery Misc plugins page. I’ll add more as they’re created, but here’s the current list:

Each plugin has both a full and minified version, along with a brief explanation and a small code sample, so check them out now!

jQuery hashchange event v1.2

Ben Alman — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:22:39 -0800

I’ve just updated jQuery hashchange event to fix a bizarre bug in Safari. Apparently references to window.location become stale when pressing the back button from a page on another domain.

Of course, this broke the plugin for the one person who was doing this (thanks for the tip, Chris), but it’s now fixed, along with WebKit Bugzilla bug 34679 filed, and a few other miscellaneous things:

The IE6/7 Iframe is now inserted after the body (this actually works), which prevents the page from scrolling when the event is first bound.
The event can also now be bound before DOM ready, but it won’t be usable before then in IE6/7. Meaning: you can do it, but be warned!
The plugin is now unit-tested in jQuery 1.4.2pre, and everything works!

jQuery BBQ will be updated soon to incorporate these changes, but if you want them right now, you can just grab the hashchange event plugin!

jQuery resize event v1.0

Ben Alman — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:05:27 -0800

With jQuery resize event, you can now bind resize event handlers to elements other than window, for super-awesome-resizing-greatness!

Long ago, the powers-that-be decided that the resize event would only fire on the browser’s window object. Unfortunately, that means that if you want to know when another element has resized, you need to manually test its width and height, periodically, for changes. While this plugin doesn’t do anything fancy internally to obviate that approach, the interface it provides for binding the event is exactly the same as what’s already there for window.

It’s easy to use, fun for the whole family, and will get those tough grass stains out of your favorite pair of pants, so check it out now!