Chapter 9. Prominent, powerful, and practical plugins
This chapter covers
- An overview of the jQuery plugins
- The official Form Plugin
- The official Dimensions Plugin
- The Live Query Plugin
- The UI Plugin
In the first eight chapters of this book, we focused on the capabilities that the core jQuery library makes available to us as page authors. But that’s the tip of the iceberg! The immense collection of available jQuery plugins is impressive and gives us even more tools, all based on the jQuery core, to work with.
The creators of the core jQuery library carefully chose the functions needed by the vast majority of page authors and created a framework on which plugins can readily be built. This keeps the core footprint as small as possible and lets us, the page authors, decide how we want to spend the rest of our bandwidth allowance by picking and choosing what additional functionality is important enough to add to our pages.
It’d be an impossible task to try to cover all of the jQuery plugins in the space of a chapter, perhaps even in the space of a single book, so we had to choose which plugins to talk about here. It was a tough call, and the plugins we included are those that we felt were either important enough or useful enough to the majority of web application developers to warrant coverage.
Non-inclusion of a plugin in this chapter is most certainly not an indictment of a plugin’s usefulness or quality! We just had to make some hard decisions.