jQuery Pocket Reference

Chapter 10. The jQuery UI Library

jQuery limits itself to providing core DOM, CSS, event handling, and Ajax functionality. These provide an excellent foundation for building higher-level abstractions, such as user interface widgets, and the jQuery UI library does just that. Full coverage of jQuery UI is beyond the scope of this book, but this chapter offers a simple overview. You can find the library and its documentation at http://jqueryui.com.

As its name implies, jQuery UI defines a number of user interface widgets: auto-completion input fields, date pickers for entering dates, accordions and tabs for organizing information, sliders and progress bars for visually displaying numbers, and modal dialogs for urgent communication with the user. In addition to these widgets, jQuery UI implements more general “interactions”, which allow any document element to be easily made draggable, droppable, resizable, selectable, or sortable. Finally, jQuery UI adds a number of new visual effects methods (including the ability to animate colors) to those offered by jQuery itself, and defines lots of new easing functions as well.

Think of jQuery UI as a bunch of related jQuery plugins packed into a single JavaScript file. To use it, simply include the jQuery UI script into your web page after including the jQuery code. The Download page at http://jqueryui.com allows you to select the components you plan to use, and will build a custom download bundle for you that may reduce your page load times ...