The version 1.5 release of jQuery UI was a milestone in the library's history. This was the release in which the API for each component was significantly simplified, making the library both easier to use and more powerful.

Once you've worked with one of the components from the library, you'll instantly feel at home when working with any of the other components since the methods of each component are called in exactly the same way.

The API for each component consists of a series of different methods. While these are all technically methods, it may be useful to categorize them based on their particular function.

Methods are consistently called throughout each of the different components by passing the method that we'd like to call as a simple string to the component's plugin method, with any arguments that the method accepts passed as strings after the method name.

For example, to call the destroy method of the accordion component, we would simply do as follows:

$("#someElement").accordion("destroy");

See how easy that was? Every single method exposed by all of the different components is called in this same simple way.

Some methods, like standard JavaScript functions, accept arguments that trigger different behavior in the component. If we wanted to call the disable method on a tab in the tabs widget for example, we would do the following:

$("#someElement").tabs("disable", 1);

The disable method, when used in conjunction with the tabs widget, accepts an integer which refers to the index of the individual tab within the widget.

Similarly, to enable the tab again we would use the enable method:

$("#someElement").tabs("enable", 1);

Again we supply an argument to modify how the method is used. Sometimes the arguments that are passed to the method vary between components. The accordion widget for example does not enable or disable individual accordion panels, only the whole widget, so no additional arguments following the method name are required.

The option method is slightly more complex than the other common methods, but it's also more powerful and is just as easy to use. The method is used to either get or set any configurable option after the component has been initialized.

To use the option method in getter mode to retrieve the current value of an option, we could use the following code:

$("#someElement").accordion("option", "navigation");

This code would return the current value of the navigation option of the accordion widget. So to trigger getter mode we just supply the option name that we'd like to retrieve.

In order to use the option method in setter mode instead, we can supply the option name and the new value as arguments:

$("#someElement").accordion("option", "navigation", "true");

This code would set the value of the navigation option to true. As you can see, although the option method gives us the power to both get and set configuration options, it still retains the same easy to use format of the other methods.

Using jQuery UI feels just like using jQuery and having built up confidence coding with jQuery, moving on to jQuery UI is the next logical step to take.

var config = {
  select: function() {
  }
};

$("#someElement").bind("tabsselect", function() {
});

beforeclose: function() {
  if (readyToClose === false) {
    return false
  }	
}

var config = {
  select: function(e, ui) {

    e.target

    ui.index
  }
};