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.
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(); });You can also call Featurette.load with a parameter for a class name
you'd like Featurette to match against instead of the featurette
class. So, for example, Featurette.load("so-rad") would match all
elements have the class so-rad on them and try to load features based
on those elements data-featurette attribute.
Now let's attach that exclamation feature to the h1 tag:
<h1 class="featurette" data-featurette="exclamation">Hola</h1>Featurette requires you to dirty your html up a bit, but the benefit of
not having to add scripts to your document to
attach features makes it well worth the added markup. On our element we
add the featurette class. Featurette uses that class to find all
elements that it needs to attach to.
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.
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.
You can see a full example of using Featurette in the test/test.html
sample page.
Copyright (c) 2012 Alan Johnson
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