The popularity of jQuery owes a lot to its decision to include a plug-in architecture.This decision allows any number of third-party developers to create and extend thejQuery functions beyond the original library functions. The result is hundreds ofplug-ins that provide nearly any type of function needed on a Web application. Thisarticle describes this plug-in architecture and explains how jQuery can help your Webapplication behave just like a desktop application.... In this series of five articles, I'm looking to 'step it up a notch,' and take on some ofthe more intermediate-level topics in working with jQuery. This series touches uponplug-ins and plug-in development, the jQuery UI package, more advanced topics increating jQuery widgets, more advanced Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax)techniques, and finally, looks at the performance of jQuery compared to JavaScriptand other libraries. This first article in the series discusses the plug-in structure used in jQuery. Plug-insare likely the main reason jQuery has grown so much quicker than the other JavaScript libraries. Because they have been embraced by third-party developers,hundreds of plug-ins have been developed to add to the jQuery functionality.