Sorry about the unplanned hiatus last week. Not sure how long I’m going to be able to sustain this, but here we go again with another weekly roundup of jQuery news…

jQuery + Server-Side Solutions

A common complaint in the earlier days of jQuery was that there wasn’t enough information on how to integrate jQuery with server-side languages (or frameworks), so it’s nice to see a proliferation of tutorials in this area. Here are a few of the recent ones:

• ColdFusion: Validating Common Email Domain Misspellings using ColdFusion and jQuery. Incorporates the Autocomplete plugin.
• ASP.NET: Walkthrough: full example of using MvcContrib grid with jQuery datatable
• Ruby on Rails: Add jQuery datagrids to your Rails applications
• PHP: PHP Contact Form with JQuery Validation

Plugins

• Eric Garside’s jStore plugin “allows users to access a number of different client-side storage engines through a single, convenient interface.”
• Inspired by James Padolsey’s article Introducing: JSHTML, Ben Nadel put together a jQuery Comments() Plug-in To Access HTML Comments For DOM Templating.
• Horizontal Accordion: Just released 2.0 Alpha version.
• jqPlot now joins the popular Flot plugin as a fully client-side charting solution.
• jCart: a free jQuery/PHP-based shopping cart.

Fun Stuff

Chris Barr used jQuery to create a fun little game, Guessr: Guess the Flickr Tag, which also takes advantage of the jQuery UI ThemeRoller.

Don’t forget to check out This Week in jQuery UI, vol. 6.

Here again is my somewhat arbitrary list of jQuery-related sightings on the web this week.

Featured jQuery App

The folks at Carsonified have just released a beta of Twiggy, an app that searches Twitter from Nokia’s widget-enabled phones Opera as a widget. Widget apps are built in HTML, CSS and Javascript, and are stored and executed locally. Twiggy lets you search Twitter and save favorites.
Elliott Kember, who along with Mike Kus is responsible for creating Twiggy, describes their use of jQuery in the app:

Twiggy uses jQuery for all the Javascript animations and layout changes. There are a few small widget-only APIs that interface with the phone, but I’ve used jQuery for the user interaction bits. I didn’t end up using anything very complex or tricky due to the limited time frame, but I found that the phone handled animations really well. It’d be very interesting to design a much bigger app and take the phone to its limits.

I used a Twitter jQuery plugin from http://tweet.seaofclouds.com/ and it worked just fine. I didn’t use jQuery UI – but I’d be interested to see whether it worked on such a limited platform.

I chose to use jQuery because it’s familiar, reliable and fast. I didn’t want to use custom little libraries and functions which might not work so well. I was really pleased to find that the N96, for one, runs jQuery really well in this runtime. I half-expected the rendering engine to be slow, or buggy, and shoe-horned into the phone somehow, but it’s quite happily running a full, packed jQuery 1.3.2.

Upcoming Conference

jQuery Project Team members Yehuda Katz and Brandon Aaron will be presenting jQuery on Rails on May 4 at RailsConf 2009 in Las Vegas.

jQuery Game

A brand new game, jQuery Blackjack is now available on a brand new site, jQuery Love. The game uses jQuery, jQuery UI, and a ThemeRoller theme.

Tutorials and Blog Entries

• The Filament Group just posted a terrific article, jQuery Menu: Dropdown, iPod Drilldown, and Flyout styles with ARIA Support and ThemeRoller Ready
• Benson Wong has written an Event Driven Programming with jQuery Tutorial
• Rebecca Murphey discusses custom events in her tutorial, Custom events in jQuery open doors to complex behaviors
• Barry Roodt shows 6 jQuery snippets you can use to manipulate select inputs.
• Sam Dunn explains how to create Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

Plugins

• Diego A. has released an update to his Multiple File Upload Plugin
• Ralf Stoltze has come up with another solution to the problem of animation queue buildup (which Brandon Aaron describes here) in the form of a new plugin, hoverFlow.

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

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.
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