If you’ve used jQuery for even a short period of time you will have probably come across the $.ajax method and several of it’s shortcut methods like $.getJSON or $.load

Within these methods there is usually a ‘success’ callback which fires when a 200 response is received from the server. 400 and 500 responses tend to trigger the ‘error’ callback.

So success and error are pretty generic all encompassing monsters who work for many tasks, but sometimes you need to be a little bit more clever about it.

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Every wonder how to hit the ground running with a jQuery plugin? Here is the absolute complete basics for you (and me) to copy and paste…

First we need to define our Class. I’ll call mine Boom.

var Boom = function(element, options){
	this.init('boom', element, options);
};

So now we have something to focus our plugin at we can add a prototype method to it. This makes the ‘new Boom’ code super slick and gives us a better control over the ‘this’ variable because we can whack it inside a function…

Boom.prototype = {

	init:function(type, element, options)
	{
		// do stuff on create

		// makes it available almost anywhere as this.$element
		this.$element = $(element);

		// then maybe do something with the options
	},

	another_one:function()
	{
		// do some other clever stuff.
	}

};

And finally we need to connect it up to the jQuery bit…

$.fn.boom = function (options) {

	// return this makes it chainable
	return this.each(function ()
	{
		new Boom(this, options);
	});
};

$.fn.boom.Constructor = Boom;

Very basic, but worth having here for future use. You can now call it like so…

$('li.bang').boom();