Question

Are there any specific benefits derived from defining a utility function directly on the jQuery object:

For instance, given the following two constructs:

$.someUtility = function(){
   //do some something with jQuery
}


var someUtility = function(){
   //do some something with jQuery
}

Is there any specific reason I would want to use the first example over the second?

Quick Update:
I don’t need to do any chaining, and my utility is not a plugin in the traditional sense; It will not perform any operations on a jQuery selector.

Answer 1

You’re simply borrowing the global jQuery function object to make your function available to other scripts without further polluting the global variable environment.

If you have no other scripts that rely on that function, you could make it a local variable with no disadvantage except that you’d be polluting your local variable environment.