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I love the jQuery plugin architecture, however, I find it frustrating (probably due to a lack of understanding on my part) when I want to retain a reference to the plugin instance to access properties or methods later on in my code. Edit: I want to clarify that what I am really trying to do is retain a reference to the methods and properties used within the plugin, so that I can use them later Lets take the case of a AJAX loading icon. In a more traditional OOP environment, I could do: var myIcon = new AJAXIcon(); myIcon.start(); //some stuff myIcon.stop(); The methods and properties of my object are stored on a variable for later use. Now if I want to have the same functionality in a jQuery plugin, I would call it from my main code somewhat like this: $("#myId").ajaxIcon() By convention, my plugin needs to return the original jQuery object passed to my plugin allowing for chainability, but if I do that, I loose the ability to access methods and properties of the plugin instance. Now, I know that you can declare a public function in my plugin, somewhat along the lines of $.fn.ajaxIcon = function(options) { return this.each(function () { //do some stuff } } $.fn.ajaxIcon.stop = function() { //stop stuff } However, without breaking the convention of returning the original jQuery object, I can't retain a reference to the specific instance of the plugin that I want to refer to. I would like to be able to do something like this: var myIcon = $("myId").ajaxIcon(); //myIcon = a reference to the ajaxIcon myIcon.start(); //some stuff myIcon.stop(); Any thoughts?

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