I want to ask – I am slowly learning jQuery.

What I see is an exact example of a God Object anti-pattern. Basically, everything goes to the $ function, whatever it is.

Am I right and is jQuery really an example of this anti-pattern?

To answer that question, I'm going to ask you a rhetorical question about another structure that have similar property to the DOM elements that jQuery manipulates, that is the good old iterator. The question is:

How many operation do you need on a simple iterator?

The question can be answered easily by looking at any Iterator API in a given language. You need 3 methods:


Get the current value
Move the iterator to the next element
Check if the Iterator has more elements


That's all you need. If you can perform those 3 operations, you can go trough any sequence of elements.

But that is not only what you usually want to do with a sequence of elements, is it? You usually have a much higher level goal to achieve. You may want to do something with every element, you may want to filter them according to some condition, or one of several other methods. See the IEnumerable interface in the LINQ library in .NET for more examples.

Do you see how many there are? And that is just a subset of all the methods they could have put on the IEnumerable interface, because you usually combine them to achieve even higher goals.

But here is the twist. Those methods are not on the IEnumerable interface. They are simple utility methods that actually take a IEnumerable as input and do something with it. So while in the C# language it feels like there are a bajillion methods on the IEnumerable interface, IEnumerable is not a god object.



Now back to jQuery. Lets ask that question again, this time with a DOM element.

How many operation do you need on a DOM element?

Again the answer is pretty straightforward. All the methods you need are methods to read/modify the attributes and the child elements. That's about it. Everything thing else is only a combination of those basic operations.

But how much higher level stuff would you want to do with a DOM elements? Well, same as an Iterator: a bajillion different things. And that's where jQuery comes in. jQuery, in essence provide two things:


A very nice collections of utilities methods that you may want to call on a DOM element, and;
Syntactic sugar so that using it is a much better experience than using the standard DOM API.


If you take out the sugared form, you realise that jQuery could easily have been written as a bunch of functions that select/modify DOM elements. For example:

$("#body").html("<p>hello</p>");


...could have been written as:

html($("#body"), "<p>hello</p>");


Semantically it's the exact same thing. However the first form has the big advantage that the order left-to-right of the statements follow the order the operations will be executed. The second start in the middle, which makes for very hard to read code if you combine lots of operations together.

So what does it all mean? That jQuery (like LINQ) is not the God object anti-pattern. It's instead a case of a very respected pattern called the Decorator.



But then again, what about the override of $ to do all those different things? Well, that is just syntactic sugar really. All the calls to $ and its derivatives like $.getJson() are completely different things that just happen to share similar names so that you can immediately feel that they belong to jQuery. $ performs one and only one task: let you have an easily recognizable starting point to use jQuery. And all those methods that you can call on a jQuery object are not a symptom of a god object. They are simply different utility functions that each perform one and only thing on a DOM element passed as an argument. The .dot notation is only here because it make writing code easier.
