Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Overview of this book

To make PHP applications that respond quickly, avoid unnecessary page reloads, and provide great user interfaces, often requires complex JavaScript techniques and even then, if you get that far, they might not even work across different browsers! With jQuery, you can use one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, forget about cross-browser issues, and simplify the creation of very powerful and responsive interfaces ñ all with the minimum of code. This is the first book in the market that will ease the server-side PHP coder into the client-side world of the popular jQuery JavaScript library. This book will show you how to use jQuery to enhance your PHP applications, with many examples using jQuery's user interface library jQuery UI, and other examples using popular jQuery plugins. It will help you to add exciting user interface features to liven up your PHP applications without having to become a master of client-side JavaScript. This book will teach you how to use jQuery to create some really stunning effects, but without you needing to have in-depth knowledge of how jQuery works. It provides you with everything you need to build practical user interfaces for everything from graphics manipulation to drag-and-drop to data searching, and much more. The book also provides practical demonstrations of PHP and jQuery and explains those examples, rather than starting from how JavaScript works and how it is different from PHP. By the end of this book, you should be able to take any PHP application you have written, and transform it into a responsive, user-friendly interface, with capabilities you would not have dreamed of being able to achieve, all in just a few lines of JavaScript.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
jQuery 1.3 with PHP
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 9. Data Tables

From time to time, you will want to show data in your website and allow the data to be sorted and searched.

It always impresses me that whenever I need to do anything with jQuery, there are usually plugins available, which are exactly or close to what I need.

In this chapter, we will look at:

  • How to install and use the DataTables plugin

  • How to load data pages on request from the server

  • Searching and ordering the data

The DataTables plugin allows sorting, filtering, and pagination on your data.

Here's an example screen from the project we will build in this chapter. The data is from a database of cities of the world, filtered to find out if there is any place called nowhere in the world:

Get your copy of DataTables from http://www.datatables.net/, and extract it into the directory datatables, which is in the same directory as the jquery.min.js file.

What the DataTables plugin does is take a large table, paginate it, and allow the columns to be ordered, and the cells to be filtered...