gertjanreynaert/featurette

The easiest way to enhance DOM elements.

Featurette

Featurette is a super simple javascript library for adding javascript features to elements in a web page. It's based on patterns that we've used at Treehouse to make our javascript less obtrusive and to have fewer in page scripts.

Getting Started

To add a feature to an element involves writing and registering a class that defines your feature and then declaring that you want to use that feature on a particular element. Let's look at a quick example feature. While this example is written in CoffeeScript, you can use JavaScript with Featurette as well.

A feature can be any JavaScript object. Let's define a feature that adds cool Spanish exclamation marks to whatever element it's applied to. We're using jQuery with this feature, just to make life a little easier.

Here's the feature:

class Exclamation
  constructor: (element) ->
    $element = $(element)
    newText = "¡#{$element.text()}!"
    $element.text(newText)

Featurette.register("exclamation", Exclamation)

We define a class called Exclamation with a constructor that takes one argument, the element that we're attaching the feature to. Once that class is defined we call Featurette.register to register the feature that we defined. The first argument of Featurette.register is the name we'll use to apply that feature, and the second argument is the class that we'll instantiate to attach the feature.

Now, let's imagine we want to add the exclamation feature to an h1 tag in our page. Let's look at what's required to do that. You'll want to make sure to call Featurette.load once the DOM loads. We don't include that automatically in Featurette because there are quite a few different libraries that handle DOM loaded events, and Featurette doesn't prefer one of them over the other.

Most people do use jQuery, though, so here's how to handle loading Featurette with jQuery:

  $(function() { Featurette.load(); });

Now let's attach that exclamation feature to the h1 tag:

<h1 data-featurette="exclamation">Hola</h1>

The data-featurette attribute on the h1 tells Featurette what feature to instantiate. So, when the document loads Featurette will search for all elements with Featurette on them and instantiate the class that corresponds to the feature name given on that element with data-featurette.

Accessing Featurette Objects

When you attach a feature to an element it's given an id if it doesn't already have one. You can use Featurette.get("id") to access the feature attached to an element with the passed id.

License

Copyright (c) 2013 Alan Johnson

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.