QuirkeyBlogEst. 2005

I’m very happy to announce the next major release of Sammy.js. I’ve been working on this for over a month and the result has been a lot more changes then I expected but over all a smaller, cleaner core code base. Here’s a quick run through of the biggest changes. See HISTORY or the Commits for a full list and more detail.

Plugins

The biggest change, that resulted in a lot of little changes is Sammy.Application#use() which allows you to package and resuse application level code into ‘Plugins’. See the documentation on plugins for more detail. This also marks the start of an official selection of plugins, with two as part of this release and more on the way.

The default template system that used $.srender internally has been extracted out into a plugin. To enable almost the exact same functionality:

// somewhere in your HTML (after sammy.js): 
// <script src="plugins/sammy.template.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
$.sammy(function() {
  // include the Sammy.Template plugin
  this.use(Sammy.Template);
  
});

Events

Sammy.Application’s bind() and trigger() methods now use jQuery’s namespacing to bind to Events. This means that Sammy.Application can now easily catch events that bubble to it like ‘click’ or ‘focus’. The big awesomeness is that the callbacks for these bind() methods are always evaluated within a Sammy.EventContext so that even events triggered from outside the app can be handled in the same way as internal events.

var app = $.sammy(function() {

    this.bind('custom-event', function() {
      // this == Sammy.EventContext
      alert('Custom Event' + this.params['wha']);
    });

  });

  // the app is by default bound to 'body'
  $('body').trigger('custom-event', {wha: 'ZUH?!'});
  //=> system alert ZUH?!
  

Cleanup

With the advent of plugins, Sammy Core is now even smaller (8.9k minified). This is also possible because I’ve removed the former ‘classical’ inheritence code in favor of prototypal inheritence, which is a big win in terms of cleanlieness and global scope leakage.

See Also

I mentioned this on twitter, but I’m working on some new tutorials and screencasts about Sammy. If you have ideas/suggestions, dont hesitate to let me know. The first one should be up next week. I’m going to try to do them bi-weekly, we’ll see how that goes 🙂

Again, I’ve tried to be as thorough with inline API docs as I could so any changes should be in the clear. Thanks again to everyone who helped with this release and has supported Sammy recently!

Posted September 30th, 2009 in Development, JavaScript, jQuery, Sammy, Software/Scripts
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