Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery UI 1.7
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Summary


The accordion widget allows us to implement an object on the page that will show and hide different blocks of content. This is a popular and much sought-after effect, which is implemented by big players on the Web today, such as Apple.

We then moved on to look at the configurable options that can be used with accordion. We saw that we can use these options to change the behavior of the widget, such as specifying an alternative heading to be open by default, whether the widget should expand to fill the height of its container, or the event that triggers the opening of a content drawer.

Along with configurable options, we saw that the accordion exposes several custom events. Using them we can specify to callback functions during configuration, or bind to after configuration to execute additional functionality in reaction to different things happening to the widget.

We then looked at the accordion's default animation and how we can add simple transition effects to the opening of content...