JavaScript is a prototyping programming language, and as such, has many different ways to define classes or create objects. If you try to search for a tutorial on object-oriented programming in JavaScript, you’ll find that each tutorial has its own way of doing things. It can be very confusing.
Fortunately, jQuery UI has a widget framework, that makes setting up object-oriented widgets easy. After using it, I wanted to use it for everything, until I find something at least as easy to use as it. I didn’t, however, want to include a large dependency like jQuery UI if I was only using it for its widget framework.
I was glad to find, after a little experimentation with the Build Your Download page, that I can get jQuery UI’s widget framework in a download of only 9.06 kb minified. You can get this by clicking Deselect All and checking UI Core. After that, the theme drop-down box should be set to No Theme.
I made a geocoding widget for Django in a project for a client using this. It simplified my code a great deal.
One thing it does that’s good for projects that might have a lot of custom widgets on one page (which was not the case for this one) is it takes care of using jQuery’s data() method, which stores objects in a way that is less likely to cause memory leak issues in Internet Explorer than storing objects using closures.