jQuery UI Cookbook

70 recipes to create responsive and engaging user interfaces in jQuery

Overview

• Packed with recipes showing UI developers how to get the most out of their jQuery UI widgets
• Solutions to real-world development issues distilled down in a reader-friendly approach
• Code examples written in a concise and elegant format making it easy for the reader to adapt to their own style

In Detail

jQuery UI is the quintessential framework for creating professional user interfaces. While jQuery core lays the foundation for interaction with the DOM and handling events, jQuery UI fills in the user interaction gap. This book will give you a huge productivity boost out of the box with jQuery UI, and help you understand the framework, inside and out.

“jQuery UI Cookbook” provides you with practical recipes featuring in-depth coverage of every widget in the framework, including how to address limitations that impact your everyday development activities with these widgets. You’ll get a better idea of the big picture – how the framework is composed, how the widgets relate to one another, and how to build on those patterns.

Be it a minor tweak on the visual design of a progress bar or a fundamental change in a widget to meet your needs, “jQuery UI Cookbook” covers scenarios both big and small. You can show reminders as tooltips, apply a variety of effects to the menu widget, and start interactions between the dialog widget and API data using deferred objects. These and many more interesting tasks are covered in this book, which can be done with smooth learning and great understanding. You will see how button widgets can fill the width of their containing element, making the layout more consistent. Tabs can be sorted and moved between widgets. You will learn how to do all these things within the context of the big picture, by finding out why the components work the way they do, making you well-versed in jQuery UI.

What you will learn from this book

• Benefits and tricks in each jQuery UI widget
• Build your own widget using the widget factory and the theme framwork
• Built-in event-handling utilities for inter-widget communication
• Extend widgets to provide the missing behavior your application needs
• Extend and improve the design of each widget using the theme framework, overriding defaults such as borders and backgrounds
• Details about different widget configurations not covered in the jQuery UI documentation
• Discover the role of each widget in an application and how they collectively contribute to a better user experience
• Explore coding conventions that work best when writing jQuery UI code
• Learn about unique perspectives on approaches to widget development – maintainability matters

Approach

Filled with a practical collection of recipes, jQuery UI Cookbook is full of clear, step-by-step instructions that will help you harness the powerful UI framework in jQuery. Depending on your needs, you can dip in and out of the Cookbook and its recipes, or follow the book from start to finish.

Who this book is written for

If you are a jQuery UI developer looking to improve your existing applications, extract ideas for your new application, or to better understand the overall widget architecture, then jQuery UI Cookbook is a must-have for you. The reader should at least have a rudimentary understanding of what jQuery UI is, and have written some code that uses jQuery UI.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Creating Accordions
Chapter 2. Including Autocompletes
Chapter 3. Crafting Buttons
Chapter 4. Developing Datepickers
Chapter 5. Adding Dialogs
Chapter 6. Making Menus
Chapter 7. Progress Bars
Chapter 8. Using Sliders
Chapter 9. Using Spinners
Chapter 10. Using Tabs
Chapter 11. Using Tooltips
Chapter 12. Widgets and More!