jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery [Paperback]

• Organize your interfaces with reusable widgets: accordions, date pickers, dialogs, sliders, tabs, and more
• Enhance the interactivity of your pages by making elements drag-and-droppable, sortable, selectable, and resizable
• Packed with examples and clear explanations of how to easily design elegant and powerful front-end interfaces for your web applications
• Revised and targeted at jQuery UI 1.7

In Detail Modern web application user interface design requires rapid development and proven results. jQuery UI, a trusted suite of official plug-ins for the jQuery JavaScript library, gives you a solid platform on which to build rich and engaging interfaces with maximum compatibility and stability, and minimum time and effort.

jQuery UI has a series of ready-made, great-looking user interface widgets and a comprehensive set of core interaction helpers designed to be implemented in a consistent and developer-friendly way. With all this, the amount of code that you need to write personally to take a project from conception to completion is drastically reduced.

Specially revised for version 1.7 of jQuery UI, this book has been written to maximize your experience with the library by breaking down each component and walking you through examples that progressively build upon your knowledge, taking you from beginner to advanced usage in a series of easy-to-follow steps.

In this book, you'll learn how each component can be initialized in a basic default implementation and then see how easy it is to customize its appearance and configure its behavior to tailor it to the requirements of your application. You'll look at the configuration options and the methods exposed by each component's API to see how these can be used to bring out the best of the library.

Events play a key role in any modern web application if it is to meet the expected minimum requirements of interactivity and responsiveness, and each chapter will show you the custom events fired by the component covered and how these events can be intercepted and acted upon.

What you will learn from this book?

• How the brand-new CSS framework styles each of the library components
• Organizing different sections of related content as tabs and accordions to save space on your page while maximizing its content
• Displaying messages, images, and interactive content like forms using the dialog widget
• Using sliders for volume and color control of your applications by dynamically scrolling left and right, displaying different ranges
• Allowing your site visitors to select dates from the calendar using the date picker widget
• Adding an attractive and effective deterministic progress bar to give visitors essential feedback on how much longer a process has left to complete
• Providing a drag-and-drop mechanism to let users directly rearrange elements around the page
• Making a range of elements of a group selectable and taking collective actions on them
• Creating a page with content boxes that can be sorted into various positions to suit the visitor's personal preference
• Adding flair to your actions with animation effects

Approach

An example-based approach leads you step-by-step through the implementation and customization of each library component and its associated resources in turn. To emphasize the way that jQuery UI takes the difficulty out of user interface design and implementation, each chapter ends with a 'fun with' section that puts together what you've learned throughout the chapter to make a usable and fun page. In these sections you'll often get to experiment with the latest associated technologies like AJAX and JSON.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for front-end designers and developers who need to quickly learn how to use the jQuery UI User Interface Library. To get the most out of this book you should have a good working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and will need to be comfortable using jQuery, the underlying foundation of jQuery UI.

Dan Wellman lives with his wife and three children in his home town on the south coast of England. By day his mild-mannered alter ego works for a small but successful e-commerce agency. By night he battles the forces of darkness, fighting for truth, justice and unobtrusive JavaScript. This is his third book.