Tools & Tips #2: jQuery UI
Saturday, August 15, 2009
I’m no Javascript programmer. If you asked me to do anything beyond basic form validation on the spot, you’d be waiting quite a while — which is why I love Javascript libraries.
It seems like over the last few years they’ve really come into their own. These libraries can really give you a head start on adding some UI functionality to your site with very little effort.
In the past I’ve used both Prototype/Scriptaculous and MooTools for a variety of UI effects and animations, and while they’re both great I’ve recently switched entirely to jQuery. It has a large development community, provides a fantastic framework and gives you a lot of tools right out of the box (not to mention extensive documentation).
In addition to the core library and myriad user-developed plugins, there is an entire library dedicated to UI elements. jQuery UI gives you access to dragging, dropping, sorting, resizing, accordions, progress bars, calendars, tabs and a lot more. Shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes and a half dozen lines of code to put one of the effects or widgets in place. On top of all that, you can roll your own theme with custom colors, and the jQuery UI site will kick out a custom library for you.
I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of the tabs lately, as can be seen here. Calendars are also very useful when you need a pop up date picker for a form. I’m planning to use jQuery UI for a lot more from here on out, especially to enhance forms and pack more info into a single page without it appearing overwhelming.
Give it a try. You won’t go back.