Preface

I first encountered jQuery in early 2007 and immediately found it intuitive and simple to use. I was quickly selecting elements and showing and hiding them. Next I tried to use some of the third-party plugins on offer, but found that they varied widely in usefulness and usability.

I was fortunate to start my plugin writing with what was to become a major plugin in the jQuery community. I came across Marc Grabanski’s Clean Calendar plugin, which he had converted into a jQuery plugin, and liked the interface it provided for entering a date. I started playing with it to add more features as a way to explore jQuery’s capabilities and eventually offered these back to Marc. So started a collaboration on this plugin over the next couple of years.

At that point the Calendar plugin had been renamed Datepicker and had been chosen by the jQuery UI team as the basis for its date-picker offering.

Since that start I’ve been developing other plugins as the need or interest arose. Some of my most popular ones are an alternative Datepicker that also allows for picking date ranges or multiple individual dates, a Calendars plugin that provides support for non-Gregorian calendars, a Countdown plugin to show the time remaining until a given date and time, and an SVG Integration plugin that allows you to interact with SVG elements on the web page. During this time I’ve learned a lot about JavaScript and jQuery and how to write plugins for the latter.