Good Practices in JavaScript API Development

Question

What's a good approach to designing a JavaScript API?

I'm relatively new to JavaScript and learning the key good features of the language, mostly from "JavaScript: The Good Parts". Currently, I'm designing a web based tool to teach Statistics. The code base is getting unwieldly in part because I don't understand how to design a JavaScript API.

My background is in Java and C++ and am used to designing interfaces then implementing those interfaces independently. Obviously, this doesn't work well in JavaScript.

Thanks for any help and suggestions.

Update: Final version of the tool here: http://www.lock5stat.com/statkey/index.html

Answer 1

In my opinion, if you're using jQuery, the best solution is to divide your application into jQuery plugins and UI widgets. Plugins are great way to organize the code, you can reuse them in other applications and you can also release them separately.

You can write your applications as a tree of plugins. You can think about plugins like classes in C++/Java with aggregation but not inheritance.

Notes about code: in MAIN.bootstrapPlot function you use document.createElement, you should use jQuery like in the rest of the code, and check Canto library for Canvas.

Answer 2

John Resig has a scathing critique of the NodeIterator API. Although it's a review of one specific API, it provides some insights into (at least what he believes) makes for a good tool.