Another week, another collection of links to some of the most interesting and exciting new jQuery happenings around the web.

Plugins

• Jörn Zaefferer’s wildly popular Validation plugin just got updated to version 1.5.2, which includes a slick demo of the plugin’s integration with jQuery UI Tabs.
• DataTables: uses “progressive enhancement” to convert a static HTML table into a much more dynamic data table.
• UI.Layout: allows you to “create any UI look you want – from simple headers or sidebars, to a complex application with toolbars, menus, help-panels, status bars, sub-forms.” While not a part of the jQuery UI project, you can combine it with jQuery UI widgets “to create a sophisticated application.”

Tutorials and Blog Entries

• Brandon Aaron wrote an informative article about jQuery’s Special Events.
• Marc Grabanski posted his first in a series of tutorials on jQuery and Google Maps.
• Steve Reynolds pointed to a handful of jQuery plugins that use Google APIs

A number of tutorials for incorporating jQuery with Microsoft tools have been written recently:

• Consuming REST service using jQuery in WCF (Windows Communication Foundation)
• jQuery live() and ASP.NET Ajax asynchronous postback
• 
  Calling jQuery directly from Silverlight

jQuery Training

The folks at Collective Idea have announced a three-day jQuery training course in Holland, Michigan, May 13-15. I’ll be leading the training.

Fun Experiment

Kelvin Luck has put together a really cool proof of concept using jQuery/JavaScript. He calls it boingPic and describes it as “a simple experiment using javascript and jQuery which allows you to make an image of your choice all boingy.”

Find out what has happened this week in jQuery UI

A lot has happened this week in jQueryland. Here are a few highlights:

jQuery Core Development

Brandon Aaron has been on a roll the past few days, fixing bugs and enhancing features for the next version of jQuery. Among the updates committed to the Subversion repository were better support for nested fixed position elements and added support for contexts other than document with the .live() and .die() event delegation methods. See the past week’s timeline here.

Plugins

• A new release of Haineault’s Timepickr plugin is available.
• Diego A. has updated his Star Rating plugin.
• Jason Frame put together a set of “fun little text effects.”
• The new Flexbox acts as a “replacement for html textboxes and dropdowns, using ajax to retrieve and bind JSON data.”
• Not really a plugin, Sunday Morning is a fun jQuery-based translation bookmarklet using the Google Translate API.

Tutorials and Blog Entries

• John Resig cranked out a couple blog entries, one on JavaScript Testing and the other on More Secrets of JavaScript Libraries
• Ajax Experience Talks: Resig, Slocum, and Heilmann: Ajaxian has added to the list of presentations from last year’s Ajax Experience conference that are now available online. One of the presentations features John Resig discussing advanced jQuery.
• jQuery and Strophe: Made for Each Other
• Simple example of loading a ColdFusion query with jQuery
• Prefetching JavaScript (or anything) with jQuery

Free Book Chapter

Packt Publishing has posted a sample chapter of the new Learning jQuery 1.3 book. You can download the free PDF.

Don’t forget to check out This Week in jQuery UI

This is the first in what we’re hoping to be a weekly series of blog posts about what is going on in the world of jQuery. We’ll take a look at new or updated plugins, recent tutorials, and other jQuery-related news.

Book

Jonathan Chaffer and I (Karl Swedberg) just had our book Learning jQuery 1.3 published by Packt Publishing. It’s an update of the popular Learning jQuery book, which was released nearly two years ago. The new one features additions to the library (event namespacing, JSONP, new effects methods, etc.) introduced since the release of the first book, improved and extended examples, expanded plugins chapters, and a quick reference to all methods and selectors. It’s available on the Packt website and on amazon.com.
Continue reading →