Integrate widget factory

[jzaefferer]

This ticket is mostly meant to start a discussion around the jQuery UI widget factory, and potentially integrating it into jQuery Core to make it more accessible to (plugin) developers. Even in the likely case of not landing it, getting feedback on the current design from core developers would be very useful.

Current version is here, there is a bunch of new features going to land in 1.9:  https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/blob/master/ui/jquery.ui.widget.js

Unit tests are here:  https://github.com/jquery/jquery-ui/tree/master/tests/unit/widget

Documentation (wip) is here:  https://github.com/scottgonzalez/widget-factory-docs (doesn't yet cover the internal API, like _create, _bind and more).

[scott.gonzalez]

I'm not really sure what we'll get out of this. John did a review a while ago and I incorporated all of his feedback in the 1.8 release.

[dmethvin]

Moving to open for 1.8 discussion.

[dmethvin]

We're not planning to do this in 1.8.

[davidsouther@…]

What about the discussion of moving $.widget into core? Alone, $.widget is a very powerful tool for creating plugins, and has almost no dependencies on anything else in UI. It could be very useful to pull the hierarchy and bridge code out, say into core jquery.plugin.js, and leave jquery.widget.js with the $.Widget code, as that is specific to UI plugin lifecycles.

[dmethvin]

We don't require either in core, and our emphasis with 1.8 is to reduce bloat. Users can easily combine whatever plugins they require into a single file for their own project needs.

[dmethvin]

I don't see any good reasons for putting this in core, since we don't have a dependency on it, so I'll close this ticket.