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


We looked at two very useful library components in this chapter—the draggable and droppable components. Draggables and droppables, as we saw, are very closely related and have been designed to be used with each other, allowing us to create advanced and highly-interactive interfaces.

We've covered a lot of material in this chapter, so let's recap on what we have learned. We saw that the draggable behavior can be added to any element on the page with zero configuration. There may be implementations where this is acceptable, but usually we'll want to use one or more of the component's extensive range of configurable options.

In the second part of this chapter, we saw that the droppables class allows us to easily define areas on the page that draggables can be dropped onto, and can react to things being dropped on them. We can also make use of a smaller range of configurable droppable options to implement more advanced droppable behavior.

Both components feature an effective event model...