Designing Better JavaScript APIs

[TheTime]

At some point or another, you will find yourself writing JavaScript code that exceeds the couple of lines from a jQuery plugin. Your code will do a whole lot of things; it will (ideally) be used by many people who will approach your code differently. They have different needs, knowledge and expectations.

This article covers the most important things that you will need to consider before and while writing your own utilities and libraries. We’ll focus on how to make your code accessible to other developers. A couple of topics will be touching upon jQuery for demonstration, yet this article is neither about jQuery nor about writing plugins for it.

Peter Drucker once said: “The computer is a moron.” Don’t write code for morons, write for humans! Let’s dive into designing the APIs that developers will love using.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Fluent Interface
   
2. Consistency
   
3. Handling Arguments
   
4. Extensibility
   
5. Hooks
   
6. Generating Accessors
   
7. The Reference Horror
   
8. The Continuation Problem
   
9. Handling Errors
   
10. Going Asynchronous
    
11. Debugging Fluent Interfaces
    
12. Documenting APIs
    
13. Conclusion
    

Sursa