jQuery UI 1.5b: New API, more features, huge performance boost

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Hey everybody,

The jQuery team is proud to release the first beta release of the new upcoming version of UI, jQuery UI 1.5! It has been a long path to this release – originally intended to be a bugfix release, it was growing into something we just couldn’t call 1.0.1, not even 1.1, no, it’s so damn delicious we had to call it 1.5.

jQuery UI 1.5 is a complete overhaul of the library – many of the components have been completely rewritten from scratch to improve overall stability and performance, and we finally managed to settle on a unified API for all components. So let’s get straight to a list of all the changes:

Unified API

The API has been updated for all UI components. It should now be very easy to use other plugins if you’re familiar with one of them. There is only one exposed method for every plugin – All other methods are called by passing in a String into the exposed method, the initialization of the plugin works by giving on a options hash as first argument. You can now change and get all options at a later point if you want to by using the new data method. Basic example for draggables:


$(..).draggable({...}); //Initialize the draggable
$(..).draggable("disable"); //Disable the draggable
$(..).data("cursor.draggable", "move") //Change the cursor during drag to 'move'

Updated and revised documentation

The documentation in the jQuery Wiki has been completely updated to reflect the recent changes. We also made sure all callbacks and its arguments are documented this time.

Drag & Drop: Snapping, Relative dragging

Draggables and Droppables have been completely refactored. It might now be the most non-destructive drag & drop implementation ever: The css position’s value will not be changed except for ‘static’: That means that elements, that were static or relative, will not be forced into absolute positioning, which often destroyed layouts, especially when dealing with floats.

Some options have been renamed to better be recognized: preventionTimeout becomes delay, preventionDistance becomes distance.

Also, a new option plugin has been added: The snap plugin. Remember the docking Winamp windows? Yes, you can do that now with UI draggables – just set “snap” to a selector to select all elements you want to snap to and you’re ready to go. Of course, you can also configure it to your needs using snapTolerance and snapMode.

Slider: Ranges, multiple handles and accessibility

The slider wasn’t refactored, but has been completely rewritten from scratch. While it’s still almost backwards compatible, it’s now very stable and simpler than ever: The moveTo method now only takes two arguments: The value you want to move the handle to and optionally the index of the handle you want to move. Want to retrieve a specific handle value? No problem, just call $(..).slider(“value”, index) .

Even better, the slider now is completely keyboard accessible: You can now tab and focus each slider handle seperately and move its position using the left/right keys. We also improved support for using the mouse: Clicking into a empty area now moves the focused handle to the clicked position, regardless on how many handles you have.

For those of you searching for advanced usage, the slider now supports ranges: Just set the option “range” to true and make sure you have two handles, and the script will create a visible range between these two sliders that can be styled individually. The script even makes sure that you cannot create negative ranges.

Sortables: Connected sortables, serialization and more

Rewritten as well, the sortables now support a wide range of features you already know from draggables: cursor, zIndex, revert, opacity, axis, handles, containment and scrolling. Additional to that, you can now serialize your items to a url hash, and you now have the often requested ability to connect multiple sortables, so you can drag a node from one sortable to another.

and there’s more!

This is just an excerpt of the plugins I personally was involved in – the final release will come with an official changelog – but most of the other plugins have been refactored as well, with tons of new features in datepicker, tabs, accordion, resizables and more.

..and less!

Preparing for our sister library Enchant, we removed the magnifier and the shadow plugin and moved it to Enchant. Worry not, you can find them in our SVN trunk under trunk/fx. Additionally, the table sorter component has been removed because of API and roadmap incompabilities. There will soon be a grid component that includes most of its functionality.

…and countless bugfixes

We could have made it easy for us, just rewrite everything and delete all bug tickets of 1.0 because it’s not possible to track down anymore, but we did not: All issues coming in for the 1.0 release have been adressed and solved.

For everything that has changed in this release, please consult the documentation or look for it in the code. Remember this is a beta release – expect things to be buggy and unstable (but better than 1.0 :P ). Also, you would do us a great favor if you report any issues to our bug tracker.

Now go ahead and grab it here: http://ui.jquery.com or directly from our google code page: jquery.ui-1.5b.zip. For this release, we deactivated the downloader – so please download the zip package and include what you need. You can read about the dependancies in the documentation.

Thanks to all the contributors who made this release possible – I will thank each of you individually in the final release notes, I’m too lazy and too tired to do it twice :)

See you again in about two weeks!

jQuery 1.2.3: AIR, Namespacing, and UI Alpha

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We’re happy to announce a brand new release of jQuery. This is primarily a bug fix release for jQuery 1.2. You can view the full list of what was fixed on the bug tracker.

Downloading

jQuery 1.2.3:

If you wish to checkout the full release from the Subversion repository, you can do so by following the instructions and checking out the source from the following location:

svn co http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.2.3

Important Changes

The primary purpose of this release was to fix a couple outstanding bugs from the jQuery 1.2.2 release. Specifically, this release is now compatible with Adobe AIR, will be included in Drupal 6, and will be the base for jQuery UI 1.5. Additionally, a couple minor features, for plugin developers, were included in this release.

.data() and .removeData()

These methods complement the, already included, jQuery.data and jQuery.removeData methods introduced in jQuery 1.2. The important change, however, is that they’ve been tailored for plugin developers. You can now namespace data additions – like you can with event binding/unbinding. For example:

  $("div").data("test", "original");
  $("div").data("test.plugin", "new data");
  alert( $("div").data("test") == "original" ); // true
  alert( $("div").data("test.plugin") == "new data" ); // true

Additionally, getting or setting data values can be overridden by a plugin. For example, the following code is from the, recently updated, draggables in jQuery UI:

  $(element).bind("setData.draggable", function(event, key, value){
     self.options[key] = value;
  }).bind("getData.draggable", function(event, key){
     return self.options[key];
  });

The above makes it such that all attempts to get and set draggable-namespaced data will be intercepted and handled by the plugin directly (rather than being bound directly to the element). The result is a powerful new interface for dealing with internalized data within a plugin.

.unbind(“.namespace”)

In jQuery 1.2 you could add and remove namespaced events, however you always had to include a name for the type of event being used. With this addition you can now remove all bound events that match a particular namespace, for example:

  $("div").bind("click.plugin", function(){});
  $("div").bind("mouseover.plugin", function(){});
  $("div").unbind(".plugin"); // All handlers removed

The above removes all bound event handlers that are within the “plugin” namespace.

.trigger(“click!”)

Finally, a new addition was included to allow exclusion of namespaced events from being triggered. For example:

  $("div").bind("click", function(){ alert("hello"); });
  $("div").bind("click.plugin", function(){ alert("goodbye"); });
  $("div").trigger("click!"); // alert("hello") only

The above only triggers the non-namespaced event handlers.

Alpha Release: jQuery UI 1.5 and jQuery Enchant 1.0

Last, but not least, we’re pleased to announce a new alpha release of jQuery UI. This is an overhaul of the existing code base with tons of a bug fixes and API tweaks. We need a ton of help testing this alpha, making sure that it’ll be rock-solid for the upcoming release candidate. Please participate in the discussion, helping us to get ready.

Additionally, we’re working on a new plugin called jQuery Enchant which will bring a ton of advanced effects to the library (like clip, shake, and explode – to name a few). This is an alpha release of this plugin, as well – so please help us test it and make sure that it’s completely up to the jQuery level of quality.

Download

Demos

Enjoy!

Workin’ Hard

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Paul Bakaus (jQuery UI Lead) and John Resig (jQuery Lead) working on
the next release of jQuery UI (1.5) and jQuery Core (1.2.3).

It’s a rare treat, in distributed Open Source development, to be able to work face-to-face with a fellow developer. Paul is located in Germany, I in Boston – and much of the jQuery team is scattered around the globe. He stopped into town for the weekend so that we could make sure that all the necessary code was in jQuery core for the upcoming jQuery UI 1.5 release candidate. We also had a chance to discuss the future of jQuery UI and plan out some of the best resource allocations for the upcoming months.

All that being said, this next release is going to be fantastic. It’s what jQuery UI 1.0 should have been. It’s been rough because of all the constraints on developer time that were in place when we first set out with this project, but it’s been getting better. Paul now works on jQuery UI full-time – and Liferay is putting a ton of resources towards making sure that the future of the library will be successful. It’s really exciting to see this project grow up and start to see some light.

jQuery 1.2.3 should be released within the next couple days (after some more testing) and jQuery UI 1.5rc1 will be announced on the jQuery UI mailing list at about that time.

Reposted from my blog.

jQuery UI and beyond: The jQuery-Liferay partnership

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jQuery UI is growing, and I’m already seeing quite a few sites using it exclusively to support their interface. As a matter of fact, it’s growing so well, that a LA-based open-source company decided to hire a person to exclusively work on jQuery UI full-time.

I’m very happy to announce that I, Paul Bakaus, lead of jQuery UI, was hired by Liferay Inc., the company behind the world’s most popular open source java portal, to focus solely on bringing jQuery UI to a next level. This has an enormous effect to the whole project – I can now invest almost three times the amount of time and power, and I’m helping to deploy jQuery and jQuery UI in mission critical projects, which makes a huge difference.

Liferay’s plans are to standardize all their products to use jQuery and its plugins for the future (you’ll still be able to use other libraries at the same time) – it’s therefore in their very interest to see jQuery UI enjoying a long life, growing to meet expectations of all kinds of clients and beyond. To reach this goal, hiring me was the most logical decision: I now have no excuse not-to-focus on jQuery UI for a while – after all, it’s my day job!

But the cooperation with Liferay is even more than that: Liferay will be the first company starting from today to offer business critical support services for both jQuery and jQuery UI. Not only we’ll have a open source company backing us, but it’s the best publicity a project can have: jQuery UI will run in huge intranets, on every copy of Liferay. This will have a strong effect on both the distribution of the project and the level of quality that is being provided.

I myself am extremely excited about the change – there are countless positive side effects and products coming up – new products featuring jQuery, sponsored themes for UI, a new website, and of course – a new version of jQuery UI (the release date of the new, polished version with all the long-awaited bugfixes will be announced in the next couple of days).

jQuery 1.2.2: 2nd Birthday Present

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On the 2nd anniversary of jQuery’s release we’re proud to bring you a brand new release of jQuery. This is primarily a bug fix release for jQuery 1.2. You can view the full list of what was fixed on the bug tracker.

Downloading

jQuery 1.2.2:

If you wish to checkout the full release from the Subversion repository, you can do so by following the following instructions and checking out the source from the following location:

svn co http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.2.2

Important Changes

A lot of hard work was put into this release by Brandon Aaron and David Serduke. David is a new addition to the jQuery core development team and has been making significant contributions – please help us in welcoming him!

Primarily, this has been a bug fix and optimization release. We landed over 120 bug fixes and our test suite now has over 1157 tests in it – which we are quire proud of.

300% Speed Improvements to $(DOMElement)

Once again, we’ve taken a step at micro-improving the most-used features in jQuery. Specifically, the use of passing a DOM element into the jQuery function. (Most frequently used when you see stuff like $(this) in your code.)

Here’s a quick peak at some of the speed jumps that you can expect in all the major browsers:

Browser 1.2.1 (ms) 1.2.2 (ms)
Firefox 2 0.041 0.015
Firefox 3 0.033 0.01
Safari 3 0.017 0.005
Opera 9 0.023 0.004
Internet Explorer 6 0.04 0.03

.ready() Overhaul

The document ready function has been long due for some extra love. We’ve made a number of specific changes.

* Internet Explorer document ready drastically improved. We use a new technique inspired by Diego Perini. It allows us to not have to do a document.write() anymore, which is really fantastic.
* All browsers now wait for CSS to be ready, in addition to just the DOM. In reality, it’s not just a vanilla document ready anymore – but we found that users, overwhelmingly, needed to wait for document styling to be active (such as knowing if an element is visible, or what its height is). Specifically we’ve added improvements to Safari and Opera to make this possible.
* $(document).bind("ready", fn); – You can now watch for the document ready event via the traditional .bind() function. Of course, .ready() still works as you would expect it to.

.bind(“mouseenter”) / .bind(“mouseleave”)

The functionality that was the core of the .hover() function has been split out into two new cross-browser events: mouseenter and mouseleave. These are different from mouseover and mouseout as those events will fire as you move in and out of child elements (which is generally not desired). For example, the following are both valid and work perfectly in jQuery 1.2.2:

$("li").hover(function(){
  $(this).addClass("hover");
}, function(){
  $(this).removeClass("hover");
});
$("li").bind("mouseenter", function(){
  $(this).addClass("hover");
}).bind("mouseleave", function(){
  $(this).removeClass("hover");
});

.bind(“mousewheel”)

We have a new plugin, written by Brandon Aaron, based on the new Event API which adds mousewheel event support to jQuery core. This will allow you to write things like:

$("div").bind("mousewheel", function(event, delta){
  if ( delta < 0 )
    $(this).append("up");
  else
    $(this).append("down");
});

Complex :not()

Even though it's not part of the CSS 3 specification it's been a common feature request - so you can now do complex expressions in your :not() selectors. For example, the following now work:

$(".hover:not(li.active)")
$("li:not(.active,.hover,:contains(test))")

Accept Headers

For normal jQuery Ajax operations we now send an extra Accept header to let the server know what kind of content we're looking for. If you specify a dataType argument then we'll take care of all the header setting for you. We currently send the following headers for each dataType.

  • xml "application/xml, text/xml"
  • html "text/html"
  • script "text/javascript, application/javascript"
  • json "application/json, text/javascript"
  • text "text/plain"
  • Everything else: "*/*"

Bug Fixes

Here's a sampling of some of the functionality that's seen some important overhauling.

* .clone() overhaul
* Script evaluation overhaul
* height() / width() overhaul
* Cross-frame DOM manipulation
* A few memory leaks have been resolved

Event API

There's a new API for dealing with events. You can now create your own custom event types (with custom ways of being set up and torn down). Effectively, it allows you to go beyond simple event triggering and create a full scheme for attaching, handling, and tearing down events on an element. A demonstration plugin was created by Brandon Aaron that you can use to learn the powerful new API.

Google Using jQuery

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Google relaunched their Google Code site with a new design and, you guessed it, jQuery under the hood! Dion Almaer, employee at Google and co-founder of Ajaxian.com, discusses the redesign on his blog and makes mention to the fact that the Google team is now using jQuery for the Google Code site. DeWitt Clinton also discusses this on the Google Code Blog:

For example, the search results pages use a combination of the AJAX Search API and Custom Search Engines. The homepage gadgets use the AJAX Feed API and Google Reader feeds. The videos are powered by the YouTube API, the blogs by the Blogger API, the events powered by the Google Calendar API, the metrics by Google Analytics, the forums by Google Groups, etc., etc.. And we’re pleased to use jQuery, the wonderful open source JavaScript library (not ours, we’re just fans), to help power each page. Stay tuned — over the upcoming weeks we’ll offer detailed articles and tutorials about how we built the various parts of Google Code using open technologies.

As pioneers in the Ajax and JavaScript space, it’s extremely exciting to have Google use jQuery to help them build out this site and we look forward to helping the Google team in the future.

jQuery in Action (Get 30% Off!)

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Hey guys,

As many of you already know, I have been working on jQuery in Action, a book on jQuery for Manning Publishers.

Almost the entire book is available on MEAP (Manning Early Access Program), and it’s going to be published in December of this year.

The book itself is pretty awesome. It tries to give you the information you need with a useful narrative, including motivation for certain parts of jQuery. One of the greatest things about the book, in my humble opinion, are the labs, which allow you to test out parts of jQuery without having to throw together an entire test case. For instance, there’s a selector lab, which lets you see, visually, which elements will be selected by a given jQuery selector, and a drag/drop lab, which lets you test drag options via radio buttons and then see the results in action quickly.

It’s currently the only book out that covers jQuery 1.2, as well as the important parts of jQuery UI (including stuff like the undocumented callback object that you get in the draggable/droppable primitives). Toward the end of the book, you get full-chapter examples (my favorite is the Ajax chapter, which covers building an Ajaxified store selling boots ;) ), and focuses heavily on jQuery best practices and Unobtrusive Scripting.

The book itself is very much in the spirit of jQuery: short and to the point, while covering the important background material necessary to fully understand the topics at hand (especially non-trivial topics like event binding and Ajax).

Without further ado, you can purchase the book (you’ll get the prerelease stuff now and the complete book when it’s released in December) at Manning’s Site. If you use the coupon code JQM30 before the end of October, you will also receive a 30% discount.

jQuery UI: Interactions and Widgets

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Meet the jQuery UI team at jQueryCamp Boston!
We’re having a free one day conference this October and most of the jQuery, and jQuery UI, teams will be there. Come along, ask questions, and meet the people who build the library that you love!

User Interface - Green

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.