Creating user experiences that excite users is a fun and rewarding job. You're essentially improving the lives of many people. Most UI developers have their eye on the finish line, seeing their product put to use. The faster we get to that finish line without sacrificing quality, the better. The tools we use to help get us there can make all the difference in the world.
Part of what makes the jQuery Framework so popular among developers, the "write less, do more" mantra, materializes in jQuery UI as well. The modern versions of HTML and CSS standards have the tools required for assembling a robust, responsive user interface. Where this idea falls apart—browser inconsistencies and lack of development conventions and patterns across projects—jQuery UI steps in. The goal of jQuery UI isn't to reinvent the way we write web applications, but rather, to fill in gaps and progressively enhance existing browser components.
Like any framework, jQuery UI isn't for everyone, nor is it perfect for those that do use it. The framework embraces this fact, and provides extensibility mechanisms for most situations you might find yourself in. My goal with this book is to share with you some experiences I've had with jQuery UI widgets. I've extended where possible, and hacked where necessary. I'm sure you'll find the majority of the recipes in this book useful, no matter what kind of application you're building.
Chapter 1, Creating Accordions, helps you learn how to drag-and-drop between accordion widgets. In addition, you'll learn how to extend the accordion theme.
Chapter 2, Including Autocompletes, explains the autocomplete widget that shows how to use multiple data sources. Turning select options into autocomplete widgets, and remote data source filtering are covered too.
Chapter 3, Crafting Buttons, explains about modifying buttons for our application. Buttons can be simple, modifying text and icon options. Or, buttons can be more involved, such as when working with button sets. We'll look into spacing issues, and how to apply effects.
Chapter 4, Developing Datepickers, talks about datepicker, which is the most widely-used widget, yet the most under-utilized. We'll uncover some potentials of the widget by using some techniques to better integrate datepicker into your application.
Chapter 5, Adding Dialogs, discusses dialog widgets, which often rely on API data. We'll look into loading data and dialog display issues. We also cover changing the dialog title bar, and applying effects to the widget.
Chapter 6, Making Menus, helps you learn how to make sortable menu items. We'll address theme concerns and highlighting the active menu item as well.
Chapter 7, Progress Bars, shows how to add labels to progress bars. We'll also extend the progress bar to make a loading widget.
Chapter 8, Using Sliders, talks about the slider widget that doesn't display step increments. Here, you will extend the widget to provide this capability. We also look into changing the visual display of the slider handle.
Chapter 9, Using Spinners, explains spinners, which are often used in forms. So we deal with formatting spinner values for local currencies and dates in this chapter. We'll also look into addressing theme concerns with the widget.
Chapter 10, Using Tabs, introduces some new techniques in working with tabs, that is, using each tab as a plain URL link. We also cover some more advanced tab navigation usage—dynamic loading and reading the browser hash.
Chapter 11, Using Tooltips, explains tooltips, which can be applied to just about anything on the page. In this chapter, we'll show you how to apply effects to the tooltip, change the tooltip state, and apply tooltips to selected text.
Chapter 12, Widgets and More!, talks about widgets, which don't exist in a vacuum. They're part of a larger application. This chapter covers the bigger jQuery UI development picture. This includes building a widget from scratch, building your own development tools, and working with Backbone.
You will require the following:
A modern web browser for running the examples.
A text-editor for reading along and tweaking the examples.
All JavaScript dependencies included in the examples download.
Python (optional); some examples require a web server, and use the built-in Python web server in the examples. The examples could use any web server with the appropriate adjustments.
This book is for the jQuery UI developer looking to improve their existing applications, extract ideas for their new application, or to better understand the overall widget architecture. The reader should at least have a rudimentary understanding of what jQuery UI is, and have written some code that uses jQuery UI. The recipes in this book are targeted at the intermediate jQuery UI developer. Depending on your needs, each recipe is self-contained enough to be useful on its own, but connected enough to guide you to others.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "In this scenario, we're better off just changing the default dateFormat value to something our application uses throughout."
A block of code is set as follows:
$(function() {
$( ".calendar" ).datepicker();
});New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " Clicking on the no icons link would result in the button icons being removed, and replaced with their text."
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