jQuery has long been our favorite javascript library for things such as simple effects, ajax, and other behavior-related tasks. There is one place I’ve always thought jQuery could use improvement, and that is their UI elements. Well I’m pleased to announce that is all about to change.

jQuery UI is growing, and I’m already seeing quite a few sites using it exclusively to support their interface. As a matter of fact, it’s growing so well, that a LA-based open-source company decided to hire a person to exclusively work on jQuery UI full-time.

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I’d just like to announce the release of DOMAssistant 2.0 by Robert Nyman. For those of you who aren’t DOMAsses, the author describes the library as follows:

The idea of DOMAssistant is to provide a simpler and more consistent way to script against the Document Object Model (DOM) in web browsers. The idea is that everything starts with the element in question, and then performs various methods on it, such as adding/removing classes, finding elements with a certain className, applying events to it, etc.

This new release introduces several cool new features:

• Chainability
• Basic Ajax capabilities
• New DOMReady() method to better identify when the DOM is fully loaded
• XPath support

Now, being a jQuery fanatic, I was skeptical of giving this library a try, but I must say that it is actually pretty fun to work with. The chainability added in this newest version makes common tasks very simple, and the code short and easy to understand. Take a look at the following:

  // add an onclick event to #element and add the class "class-name"
  $("element").addEvent("click", function(){
    alert('Thanks for clicking, pally-o!');
  }).addClass('class-name');

Another very cool thing about this library is that it’s pretty small. The entire source code for it is only 10k (compressed, but not gzipped), where jQuery is 26kb (compressed, but not gzipped). On top if that, the library is modular. If you aren’t going to use any ajax, you don’t need to bloat up your source with the ajax functions. There are several modules in the library and you are free to pick and choose which you want to use.

Head on over to the DOMAssistant project page and take a look… don’t be a DOMAss.

jQuery 1.2 is finally here! If you are a web developer and you have not had the chance to play with jQuery, I highly recommend that you do. This library will change your life. OK, well that may be a little extreme, but I must say that before I found out about jQuery, any time I heard the words “ajax”, “interactivity”, or even just “javascript”, I’d head for the door. jQuery allows you to do what you want with javascript in a standards-friendly, unobtrusive way. It allows you to forget about all the tedious details of DOM scripting and just get down to business.

The release was announced yesterday on the official jQuery blog. They also posted the official release notes where you’ll find the links to download the source, both compressed and uncompressed, as well as instructions on how to upgrade, and documentation for the new release.

I recently discovered an amazing javascript library called jQuery by John Resig. It is so well written that it makes even those who hate Javascript (like myself) enjoy writing it. It’s philosophy is “Find things, do stuff”, and it couldn’t possibly be more true to that statement. What I love so much about it is that it can do in five lines what would have normally taken twenty.

jQuery uses the dollar sign as a function name, followed by a “query” used to “find things” to “do stuff” to. The problem with this is that other widely used javascript libraries use the dollar sign for their function names as well. One such library is Prototype. Prototype uses the dollar sign as a shortcut to document.getElementById. So, when I need to use both JQuery and Prototype, what do I do? Well, jQuery has provided a handly little method called noConflict() to deal with just such an issue. To remedy an issue where the dollar sign function names conflict, you simply assign Jquery.noConflict() to something such as $j and then use that instead of the dollar sign.
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