Some jquery plugin extend widget use _create method, while others use _init method, can someone explain the differences between the two?
Also any guidance on when it is better to extend widget or directly extend jquery.fn?
+1
A:
The downside to extending widget (as opposed to $.fn) is that you create a dependency on jquery-ui which defines the widget "class". That dependency could be expensive for users of your plugin that don't also use jquery-ui.
As far as _create vs _init goes, I'm pretty sure that _init came first and then in a recent revision they introduced and favor _create. I might be wrong about this, but I believe that _init is still supported. If it is then there shouldn't be any differences between the two.
Ken Browning
2010-10-20 22:49:33
Good point on widget. Do you have any replacement of widget if I don't want to introduce additional dependency to jqueryui?
2010-10-23 12:23:43
You could just rip out the widget code and include it in your .js file. There was talk about moving widget into jquery itself instead of jqueryui but I don't know if that's been slated for a specific release or not yet.
Ken Browning
2010-10-23 20:47:15
+1
A:
From the jQuery UI Developer Guide:
Once the element is created, all other calls to the widget name where the first parameter is not a string will call the _init() method; if options are passed, the .option() method will be called before the _init() method
fudgey
2010-10-21 02:11:34