Today we’re very pleased to announce a brand new library: jQuery UI. jQuery UI is a fully themed interaction and widget library built on top of jQuery.

You’ll be able to find everything that you need to know about jQuery UI on it’s site:
http://ui.jquery.com/

jQuery UI signals the start of a whole new branch of the jQuery project which will focus on developing high-quality, reusable, components that you’ll be able to drop in your applications. Frequently, these components are coming directly to you from traditional jQuery plugins, but with strict coding, documentation, themeing, and demo standards. We hope you’ll enjoy this new level of quality as much as we do.

We’re launching with one complete theme: Flora (designed by Tom) and two partially-complete themes: Light and Dark (by Sean). Within the next week we’re going to be announcing the details of a new theming competition, along with everything that you need to completely build your own jQuery UI theme.

Note: jQuery UI requires that you use, at least, jQuery 1.2.1 or newer.

Please be kind, there’s still going to be a mess of rough edges, as is to be expected with a brand new project. Please submit bugs to the bug tracker under the “UI” component and bring them up for discussion on the jQuery UI Mailing List. We appreciate your help.

Without further ado, here’s jQuery UI!

Demo App: Advanced Image Gallery

(Currently has issues in IE and Safari – we’re working on some fixes which should be up later today.)

Demo App: Bar Chart Navigation

(Currently only works in browsers that have Canvas support: Firefox, Safari, and Opera.)

Features: Mouse Interaction

Draggables (Docs)

Droppables (Docs)

Sortables (Docs)

Selectables (Docs)

Resizables (Docs)

Features: Widgets

Accordion (Docs)

Calendar (Docs)

Dialog (Docs)

Slider (Docs)

Tablesorter (Docs)

Tabs (Docs)

Features: Effects

Magnifier (Docs)

Shadow (Docs)

Contributors

This is the result of many months of work by over a dozen people – many of whom were first time contributors to jQuery.

For now, here’s a rough list of everyone who helped, and what they helped with. (Please let me know if I forgot anyone!)

• Paul B (Draggables, Droppables, Sortables, Resizables, Slider, Shadow, Magnifier, Gallery App)
• John (Documentation, Theming, Demos, UI Site, Cat Herding)
• Richard (Tree, Selectables, Sortables, Dialog, many bug fixes)
• Tom (Flora theme, UI Site, and UI logo)
• Sean (Theming, Dark and Light themes, Shadow, Forms)
• Klaus (Tabs)
• Joern (Accordion)
• Christian (Tablesorter)
• Adel (Downloader, Client-Side)
• Paul H (Downloader, Server-Side)
• Marc (Calendar)

With additional help from: Tane, Micheil, Gilles, Dmitri, and Yehuda. Much of their work will be seen in the next release of jQuery UI (including menus, toolbars, uploaders, splitters, and rich text editors).

I’d like to do a more-detailed write up of what everyone put into this project to thank everyone individually, as everyone did a really fantastic job of pulling together and making this happen. Paul, Tom, Richard, and Sean, especially – you guys did a superb job!

Once again, I hope everyone enjoys this new work – please be kind, it’s still got some very rough edges, so to speak. If you spot any bugs, please post them to the bug tracker under the “UI” component.

As always, feedback is appreciated! If you’d like to let us know what you think, please post to the jQuery UI Mailing List, or hop on irc.freenode.net #jquery-ui, as those are the best place to be able to find us.

Enjoy!

If you like what you see, feel free to give it a digg.