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

If you have ever used a regular expression tool to highlight character matches in real time, then you’ll jump for joy when I tell you about the Interactive jQuery selector tester written by Samuli Kärkkäinen. You enter a selector expression, and in real time you get to see the elements in the DOM structure that have been selected. I can see this being very handy for complex expressions or for optimizing expressions down to the simplest solution.

Also, in case you didn’t notice, the second maintenance release for jQuery UI 1.7 is out.

Articles this Week

• Setting and clearing Cookies are easy with jQuery. Check out this article that details the use of the jQuery cookie plugin.
• Brian Reindel tells us about Sending an XML document object to PHP with jQuery.
• I’m sure most of us are aware of the new jQuery tools. Here is a short chat with the author, Tero Piirainen.

Tutorials this Week

• Noah Hendrix posted an excellent tutorial on NETTUTS about Using jQuery To Manipulate and Filter Data.
• Back from a small hiatus is Remy Sharp, with a new jQuery for Designers post dealing with scrolling carousels. As usual, he provides an excellent screencast to complement the tutorial.

Plugins this Week

• A new jQuery mp3 player hit the streets, jPlayer! It’s also Themeroller ready!
• Need to re-skin the browser default UI forms? Check out the uniform jQuery plugin. It might just help you realize the dream of making web forms look the same across all browsers.
• If your cup of tea is dealing with mouse gestures, then you’ll be glad to know that there is now a SUPER Gestures plugin. Its SUPER!
• SWFUpload + jQuery = SWFUpload jQuery Plugin.

Plugin Spotlight/Updates

Pulled from my own personal archives. I bring you $.event.special.hover which is an alternative to Brain Cherne’s popular hoverIntent plugin. You may or may not have missed this plugin, but regardless, it’s certainly worth a first look, or second.

What’s a week of jQuery news without a lightbox thickbox super window modal dialog thingy kabob doodad solution?

SuperBox and jOverlay, welcome to the crowd! Nice to have you.

jQuery Gossip/Rumor Mill

It’s possible that you might be seeing several team members, if not John Resig himself, talking at the up and coming devdays. And the really juicy part is they might be wearing a DEVO red energy dome.

jQuery Quote of the Week

“You can save a tremendous amount of time and effort by using the browser-independent framework that JQuery has spent untold man-hours testing, debugging, and proving in the field. While there’s nothing wrong with writing JavaScript, why not speed your development time by writing to the library instead? As I’ve always said, don’t reinvent the wheel, unless you plan on learning more about wheels. ” – Jeff Atwood

After a long hiatus, I’m happy to present another roundup of jQuery happenings. Keep in mind that this is just a small, fairly random sampling of what has been going on. For more frequent news and announcements, be sure to follow @jquery on Twitter.

jQuery Updates

Brandon Aaron has been writing a series called “jQuery Edge” on his blog, detailing some of the cool enhancements in store for the next version of jQuery. His most recent, New Special Event Hooks, describes the four “hooks” that make up the new custom event API: setup, teardown, add, and remove. It’s a must-read for anyone working with event-driven jQuery scripts.

Plugins

Ben Alman describes his jQuery iff plugin: a chainable “if” statement.

Pete Higgins of Dojo fame has written a jQuery pub/sub plugin, “loosely based on the Dojo publish/subscribe API.” His plugin joins other publish/subscribe plugins such as Fling and jQuery Subscribe/Publish.

Paul Irish has ported a YUI3 script to jQuery for his idleTimer plugin. The plugin detects when a user has become idle.

Jonathan Sharp released an XMLDom plugin, which “takes a string of XML and converts it into an XML DOM object for use with jQuery.”

Tutorials

Janko Jovanovic explains his proof-of-concept for Advanced docking using jQuery

Azam Sharp examines Unit Testing JavaScript Using JQuery QUnit.

Andy Matthews begins a screencast series on jQuery and Air. His first post explores creating a new AIR project in Aptana.

Interviews

In an audio interview, Nathan Smith and Matt Vasquez discuss their use of jQuery.

Drew Douglass interviewed me recently for Nettuts.

Miscellaneous

A new site, jQuery List assembles a list of links to an enormous number of jQuery plugins and code examples on a single page.