Basic information about jQuery UI 1.7

This morning, the jQuery UI team announced that the latest version of the library, 1.7, is now available for download. Let's take a look at some of the new features and enhancements; they're pretty impressive!

Welcome to jQuery UI 1.7

Wait - What is jQuery UI?

"jQuery UI is a widget and interaction library built on top of the jQuery JavaScript library that you can use to build highly interactive web applications. This guide is designed to help you quickly understand how jQuery UI works. Follow the steps below The acquisition begins.”

compatibility

This latest UI version is only compatible with jQuery 1.3. This means that if you're still using jQuery 1.2.6, you'll need to upgrade; but you should do it anyway! It should also be noted that 1.7 is the first UI version to be fully compatible with jQuery 1.3.

old version

Now that 1.7 has been released, the jQuery team is working hard on making a 1.6 legacy version to compensate. Hopefully this should be released in the next month or so.

CSS UI Framework

New in 1.7, the UI is built on a framework specifically designed to assist in UI development.

jQuery UI 1.7 is built on a new and powerful CSS framework designed to support not only jQuery UI's own plugins, but also custom plugin development, so any developer can easily have their plugin ready with ThemeRoller. It is a special CSS framework that is specifically targeted at user interface development rather than overall page layout. The framework provides classes for common UI elements, states, containers, and icons, and are manipulated by the jQuery UI ThemeRoller.

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Plug-in Refactoring

All UI plugins have been refactored to take advantage of the latest new features. Additionally, hundreds of other bugs have been fixed. To allow offline documentation access, each plugin now comes with all documentation - as part of the download.

Google CDN access

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.0/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>

Copy after login

As in 1.6, make sure to link directly to Google's CDN when importing jQuery UI. What are the benefits of doing this?

• It can help you save money!
• Doing this allows you to download more scripts in parallel.
• Since the file may be cached on the user's computer, there's a chance they won't need to download the script at all, making your site faster.

New dedicated blog

A new UI-specific jQuery blog has been introduced in version 1.7. This will now be your main source for updates on development, themes, and more during each release.

Demo

The demos and documentation sections have been overhauled to simplify browsing each demo and its respective documentation.

sounds good. How do I get started?

If you're new to UI libraries, check out the Getting Started guide for step-by-step instructions.

One of the many reasons why jQuery is so popular is its excellent documentation. You will be hard-pressed to find another framework that offers so many features. jQuery UI websites are no exception. The Getting Started Guide will show you exactly what jQuery UI 1.7 does and how to use each plugin. So take a look and show us what you've built!

Big congratulations to the UI team!

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