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

Chapter 9. Drag and Drop

So far in this book, we've covered the complete range of fully released interface widgets and over the next four chapters we're going to shift our focus to the core interaction helpers. These components of the library differ from those that we've already looked at in that they are not physical objects or widgets that exist on the page.

Instead, they give an object a set of generic behaviors to suit common implementational requirements for dynamic and engaging websites. You don't actually see these components on the page, but the effects that they add to different elements, and how they cause them to behave can be easily seen. These are low-level components as opposed to the high-level widgets that we looked at in the first part of this book. There are currently five different interaction helpers, each catering for a specific interaction.

They help the elements used on your pages to be more engaging and interactive for your visitors, which adds value to your site and...