concept jQuery UI in category jQuery
This is an excerpt from Manning's book jQuery UI in Action.
From a high level, jQuery UI was, and still is, a collection of plugins and utilities that build on jQuery. But dig deeper and you find a set of consistent, well-documented, themeable building blocks to help you create everything from small websites to highly complex web applications.
Unlike jQuery plugins, the plugins and utilities in jQuery UI are supported by the jQuery Foundation. You can count on them to be officially supported and maintained throughout the life of your application.
The stability and ease of use of jQuery UI led to continuous growth in the library’s popularity. The library is now used in 19% of the top 10,000 sites on the web, and has been incorporated into WordPress core and Drupal.
In this book you’ll learn how to use the pieces of jQuery UI to create powerful and interactive websites and applications. In this chapter you’ll start by taking a thorough look at what the jQuery UI library is, why you’d want to use it, and how to download the library and get it up and running. Let’s get started!
The plugins and utilities in jQuery UI are divided into four categories—widgets, interactions, effects, and utilities (the structure of the library is presented in figure 1.1):
Figure 1.1. The pieces of the jQuery UI library, categorized into widgets, interactions, utilities, and effects
Widgets are jQuery plugins used to create UI elements such as datepickers and menus. As of version 1.11, the library has 12 widgets, shown in figure 1.2. The widgets in jQuery UI adhere to the library’s CSS framework, and therefore have a consistent look and feel. We’ll cover the jQuery UI widgets in chapters 2, 3, and 4 and the CSS framework in chapter 7.
This is an excerpt from Manning's book Extending jQuery.
jQuery UI “is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library” (http://jqueryui.com/). It defines a widget framework that allows you to create plugins that work in a consistent manner and that can take advantage of the numerous themes available for styling the UI. Chapter 8 looks at the widget framework and how you can use it to build your own component.
Alongside the various widgets provided by jQuery UI (discussed in the previous two chapters) are additional behaviors, including user interactions, such as draggable and droppable, and visual effects for presenting elements. These effects enhance the showing or hiding of elements on your web page or serve to highlight a particular element by animating various aspects of their appearance. Underlying the builtin effects is a core of functionality that’s useful in creating such animations. As you’d expect, you can add your own effects and have them integrate into jQuery UI along with the built-in ones.
In a similar way, easings enhance an animation by modifying the rate of change of an attribute value over the duration of the animation. jQuery UI provides many such easings to greatly expand the range available beyond the two defined in jQuery itself. You can also add your own easings to make the animation behave exactly as you want it to.
