Learning JavaScript Design Patterns

What Makes a Good Plug-in Beyond Patterns?

At the end of the day, design patterns are just one facet to writing maintainable jQuery plug-ins. There are a number of other factors worth considering, and I would like to share my own criteria for selecting third-party plug-ins to address some of the other concerns. I hope this helps increase the overall quality of your plug-in projects:

Quality

Adhere to best practices with respect to both the JavaScript and jQuery that you write. Are efforts being made to lint the plug-in code using either jsHint or jsLint? Is the plug-in written optimally?

Code Style

Does the plug-in follow a consistent code style guide such as the jQuery Core Style Guidelines? If not, is your code at least relatively clean and readable?

Compatibility

Which versions of jQuery is the plug-in compatible with? Has it been tested with the latest jQuery-git builds or latest stable? If the plug-in was written before jQuery 1.6, then it might have issues with attributes and properties, because the way they were approached changed in that release.

New versions of jQuery offer improvements and opportunities for the jQuery project to improve on what the core library offers. With this comes occasional breakages (mainly in major releases) as we move toward a better way of doing things. I’d like to see plug-in authors update their code when necessary or, at a minimum, test their plug-ins with new versions to make sure everything works as expected.

Reliability

The plug-in should come with ...