Comments on: jQuery Plugin for the Wufoo API

By: Steve Klebe

Steve Klebe — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:09:38 +0000

hi gang! A member of our BOD came across you guys and suggested I follow up with you. If you are interested in adding mobile billing to your offering, please get in touch with me. I too have a blog – http://www.paymenttalk.blogspot.com

By: Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:37:02 +0000

@thedude - Thanks for the feedback and for checking out the plugin. We talked to a number of members of the jQuery community on the approach used here. There were differing opinions, but the majority agreed that using the jQuery object was a fine way to go, considering the codes dependance on jQuery to work. It could be written as a stand-alone object, and if you are more comfortable using it that way, you can absolutely fork it on GitHub and tweak it to be that way.

The PHP intermediary we are suing (getter.php) is required to protect your API key and thus all the data in your wufoo account. It is possible to make API calls purely with JavaScript, but since JavaScript is publicly viewable, there would be no way to keep your API key secret.

JSONP is definitely a cool technique, but since you control the file that JavaScript is requesting, it would best implemented there rather than encouraging it directly through the wufoo API.

If you have any further questions or concerns, let me know!

By: thedude

thedude — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 01:06:42 +0000

I'm curious why you would put this on the jQuery object as opposed to using your own object. The $ is a nice shorthand, but it should be for jQuery-specific functionality. It's bad practice to just store functionaltiy on jQuery willy nilly. This isn't really a jQuery plugin, its just something that happens to have a dependency on jQuery.

Why not simply var wufooAPI = /* .. / as opposed to $.wufooAPI = / .. */ ?

Your function on $.fn makes even less sense and you admit in your comments that nobody will use it.

The php stuff could be rendered unnecessary if wufoo allowed a callback parameter in the api request (jsonp). It already supports json as output and a few lines on the service side would make this JS stuff really useful and portable.