Chapter 8
jQuery UI Part I—Making Things Look Slick
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Theming and Styling with jQuery
- Using ThemeRoller
- Using jQuery UI Widgets
jQuery UI is an associated user interface library for jQuery that contains widgets, effects, animations, and interactions. Widgets in this rich set are themeable, a process simplified by the ThemeRoller web app, and have an advanced look and feel to them. The framework also includes a very complete set of CSS classes useful for theming your application. While many of these features are replicated in other plugins, the unified codebase and API, overall quality, and flexibility of jQuery UI make it an indispensible asset when building complete web applications. This chapter covers jQuery UI theming, creating custom themes, widgets, and other ways to get effects that the jQuery core doesn’t provide.
THEMING AND STYLING
Getting started with jQuery UI is easy. You simply navigate over to jqueryui.com/download to obtain a copy. You can either download a preexisting theme or make your own. As Figure 8-1 shows, the download page also gives you the option of choosing which components to include in your download. It’s the rare project that makes full use of all the widgets and tools of jQuery UI, and in those cases, it’s better to download only the necessary components in order to reduce the download size footprint on your final product. But for exploring and experimenting, download the complete set of options.
If you want ...
