Most if not all of the jQuery plugins out there have some level of customization. But very few of the plugin authors have mastered the very particular art involved.
Achieving the “optimum level” of customization is a bit of a balancing act… go too far either way and you’ve got an unusable plugin!
Since the release of jQuery 1.3 a month and a half ago, I’ve been keeping my eye on any troubles that people have had with their upgrades. Fortunately, most people have had no problems at all. For those who have, the issues have almost always been in one of three areas. Identifying these areas and adjusting any legacy scripts ahead of time will go a long way toward ensuring a smooth transition to jQuery 1.3.x.
One of the biggest concerns I’ve heard mentioned from users of the Prototype library about jQuery is the lack of support for various array methods. The robust features Prototype provides for arrays is of great benefit to developers that do a lot of array manipulation in their JavaScript.
However, I find that after moving to jQuery, I do less array manipulation than I had done with Prototype. Perhaps jQuery has altered my development pattern so I no longer need array manipulation, or perhaps I have shifted most of my data manipulation to the server. Whatever the case, I have only on occasion missed the Prototype array methods.
Two years ago I made the somewhat immodest claim that 2007 would be the “Year of jQuery.” Since then, jQuery’s popularity has grown in ways that none of the core contributors could have imagined. Now I’m ready to make another bold pronouncement: 2009 will be the year of jQuery UI. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »
After many months of stellar work, the jQuery UI team has released version 1.5 of their flagship suite of user-interface widgets, components, and effects. This release was focused on bringing you a standardized development API across all of the components, allowing for a more seamless experience when working with the jQuery UI library. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently I have been getting a real buzz out of developing with jQuery. I’ve been using the library since 2006, releasing sporadic bits of code. In April of this year, I released the third revision of my most complex plugin, jMaps, and updated several other plugins, which are available in my mercurial repository.
This was also the same month I discovered a new plugin which has dramatically changed how I develop applications with jQuery. The plugin in question is Dan Webb’s Low Pro for jQuery, a port of the plugin of the same name for Prototype.
So what is Low Pro? It’s a plugin that provides a way of making more object-oriented JavaScript through event delegation. jQuery’s plugin architecture provides a really simple way of extending the core functionality, but there is no easy way of making macros of code that do several types of events on one element. Until now! Read the rest of this entry »
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