Book Image

Building UIs with Wijmo

By : Yuguang Zhang
Book Image

Building UIs with Wijmo

By: Yuguang Zhang

Overview of this book

Until recently, writing applications using JavaScript and HTML was difficult, because developers had to make the user interface by themselves; however, this started changing with the introduction of JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, jQuery UI, and KnockoutJS. An extension of jQuery UI, Wijmo adds features and widgets on top of jQuery UI and makes it easier to add user interface widgets to HTML documents. Building UIs with Wijmo gives you a tour of what Wijmo offers at a glance. With code recipes and well-explained examples, you will be able to use Wijmo in no time. The book gives details on options not explained in the documentation and helps you avoid those that don't work. The examples only feature the necessary code, with recommendations and best practices. This book introduces Wijmo, grouping widgets by their common application area or usage. It walks the user through the features of the dialog widget with examples as an introduction to the library. Then, widgets for forms, images, tootips, and other topics are explored. Features only available in the Wijmo dialog widget compared to the jQuery UI widget are thoroughly explained with examples. Common form components such as checkboxes, dropdowns, and inputs have Wijmo counterparts which keep the theme consistent and add functionalities. When Wijmo is used with Knockout, the UI automatically refreshes when the data changes. This book takes it further with WebSockets for two way communication between the server and client. With Building UIs with Wijmo, you will learn all the common web development components in Wijmo. You will get started using Wijmo in no time.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Introduction to Knockout


Knockout is a JavaScript library that implements the MVVM pattern. By using Knockout, you can avoid event handling and DOM manipulation with jQuery and work with declarative bindings instead. Knockout comes with a rich set of bindings for controlling the text, appearance, and flow. These include foreach, if, visiblility, and style bindings. In addition, there are specific bindings for working with form fields. They can be used to handle click events and to enable or disable UI elements. These bindings are bound to an observable or an observableArray object in the ViewModel. An observable issues notifications when their value changes. Knockout provides a simple syntax for reading and writing from an observable, as we will see. Equally important, Knockout keeps track of the right parts of your UI to update when the ViewModel changes. That means if you update an item of an observableArray object that is rendered with a foreach loop, the HTML element that corresponds...