Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Overview of this book

To make PHP applications that respond quickly, avoid unnecessary page reloads, and provide great user interfaces, often requires complex JavaScript techniques and even then, if you get that far, they might not even work across different browsers! With jQuery, you can use one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, forget about cross-browser issues, and simplify the creation of very powerful and responsive interfaces ñ all with the minimum of code. This is the first book in the market that will ease the server-side PHP coder into the client-side world of the popular jQuery JavaScript library. This book will show you how to use jQuery to enhance your PHP applications, with many examples using jQuery's user interface library jQuery UI, and other examples using popular jQuery plugins. It will help you to add exciting user interface features to liven up your PHP applications without having to become a master of client-side JavaScript. This book will teach you how to use jQuery to create some really stunning effects, but without you needing to have in-depth knowledge of how jQuery works. It provides you with everything you need to build practical user interfaces for everything from graphics manipulation to drag-and-drop to data searching, and much more. The book also provides practical demonstrations of PHP and jQuery and explains those examples, rather than starting from how JavaScript works and how it is different from PHP. By the end of this book, you should be able to take any PHP application you have written, and transform it into a responsive, user-friendly interface, with capabilities you would not have dreamed of being able to achieve, all in just a few lines of JavaScript.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
jQuery 1.3 with PHP
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Using a jQuery tab plugin


The jQuery website has a whole load of plugins available at http://plugins.jquery.com/, and some of the cream of the crop are selected to become part of the UI project, available at http://jqueryui.com/. This project covers all the common needs of web developers, using a neatly integrated suite of widgets.

Tip

jQuery UI is a separate project from the main jQuery library. The aim of jQuery UI is to provide a set of the most commonly needed widgets, with good-looking CSS themes to support them.

We will use jQuery UI extensively in this book because when starting out with jQuery, what you want to do might have already been done superbly by the jQuery UI team.

jQuery UI is hosted at http://jqueryui.com/, and has some of the same developers as the main jQuery library.

Tabs are available for most of the visual programming languages, and the method used to generate them is very common.

In the screenshot here, you can see that a tab widget is composed of two main sections,...