What Is jQuery UI

In the previous section you learned about the jQuery open source JavaScript library. In this section you see how to use its companion library jQuery UI.

jQuery UI provides advanced effects and theme-able widgets that help you to build interactive web applications.

What Is jQuery UI

The jQuery development team decided to launch an “official” collection of plug-ins for jQuery, bringing together a wide range of popular user interface components and giving them a common interface style. Using these components you can build highly interactive and attractively styled web applications with a minimum of code.

Using jQuery UI in your programs gives you access to

• Interactions—The jQuery UI library provides support for dragging and dropping, resizing, selecting, and sorting page elements.
• Widgets—These are feature-rich controls including accordion, autocomplete, button, date picker, dialog, progress bar, slider, and tabs.
• Theme building—Give your site a coherent look-and-feel across all of the user interface components. A ThemeRoller tool is available at http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/. The ThemeRoller online tool allows you to choose a theme from the gallery of prewritten designs or create a custom theme based on an existing theme as a starting point.

In this section, you see how to use a selection of the more popular plug-ins. Thanks to the consistent user interface of jQuery UI, it will then be easy to explore the many other available plug-ins by using the jQuery documentation.