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 quite substantial!
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 get you up to speed on how jQuery UI works. Follow along below to get started."
Compatibility
This latest UI release is only compatible with jQuery 1.3. That means, if you're still using jQuery 1.2.6, you'll need to upgrade; but you should do so anyways! It should also be noted that 1.7 is the first UI release that is fully compatible with jQuery 1.3.
Legacy Release
Now that 1.7 is out, the jQuery team are hard at work on making a 1.6 legacy release to compensate. Hopefully, this should be released within the next month or so.
CSS UI Framework
New to 1.7, the UI is built upon a framework that was specifically designed to assist with UI development.
jQuery UI 1.7 is built upon a brand new and powerful CSS framework that is designed to support not only jQuery UI’s own plugins, but also custom plugin development, so any developer can easily make their plugins ThemeRoller ready. It is a special kind of CSS framework that is aimed specifically at user interface development as opposed to overall page layout. The framework provides classes for commonly used UI elements, states, containers and icons and is manipulated by jQuery UI ThemeRoller.
Plugin Refactoring
To take advantage of the latest new features, all of the UI plugins have been refactored. Additionally, hundreds of miscellaneous bugs were fixed. To allow for offline documentation access, each plugin now comes with all of the 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>
As with 1.6, be sure to link directly to Google's CDN when importing the jQuery UI. What are the benefits of doing so?
- It saves you money!
- Doing so allows you to download more scripts in parallel.
- Because the file might already be cached on the user's computer, there is a chance that they won't have to download the script at all, thus making your website faster.
New Dedicated Blog
Launching with 1.7 is a new UI specific jQuery blog. This will now be your primary source for updates on development, theming, and more during each release.
Demos
The demos and documentation sections have been completely revamped to simplify the process of browsing through each demo, and its respective documentation.
Sounds Great. How Do I Get Started?
If you're new to the UI library, look over the Getting Started Guide for step by step instructions.
One, of many, reasons why jQuery has proven to be so popular is because of its fantastic documentation. You'll struggle to find another framework that provides as much. The jQuery UI website is no different. The Getting Started Guide guide will show you exactly what jQuery UI 1.7 is capable of, as well as how to use each plugin. So take a look, and show us what you've built!
A big congratulations goes out to the UI team!
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Martin March 6th
i won
( )Amr March 6th
Thats cool… jQuery is still the best JS framework!
( )I guess I’m the first who comment!
Wez March 6th
Love jQuery
( )Philo March 6th
Nice Article!
( )Abel March 6th
A screencast about jQuery would be great
( )Dan March 6th
There’s a whole series!
http://blog.themeforest.net/screencasts/jquery-for-absolute-beginners-video-series/
( )Yoosuf March 6th
nice and simply superb!
( )Alex March 6th
What a great tool. JQuery has taken over the JS Library seen because of its simplicity and creativity. Can’t wait to try this new UI Library.
( )crysfel March 6th
well done!! i love jQuery
( )charles March 6th
this is the first time i heard of jQuery UI. I think this would be a good video series like the jQuery for absolute beginners.
( )solwyvern March 6th
It’s all moving so fast! I can barely keep up with it, being fairly new to jQuery.
( )Dan March 6th
I feel the same way. I just used jQuery’s “.post” function for the first time .. yesterday? It blew me away. I never knew it was so easy.
( )Dimitry Z March 6th
As a Java first kind of guy, I could not get used to jQuery’s selector. However, with most JS frameworks going the same way (ie MooTools and Prototype), there is not much choice left but to adopt the most popular solution.
I must mention the fantastic MochaUI build in MooTools.
( )Michael Rice March 6th
And this, is why jQuery rocks.
( )Brenelz March 6th
For those of you interested, I am giving away a jQuery UI eBook – http://www.brenelz.com/blog/2009/03/06/2-web-development-ebooks-to-give-away/
( )Tom March 6th
Long life to jQ!
( )Jon Briccetti March 6th
$(”#wow”).rockout();
( )Abhisek March 8th
LOLS!
( )Shane March 6th
Thanks for the update – you’re absolutely right about the documentation – it’s superb and really helps you to get to grips with things.
Is jQuery now the de facto javascript framework?
( )aldrin March 6th
it’s really interesting to know, even though i’m not expose to jquery coz i’m using mootools, but i admit that jquery is become most popular js library in most web apps, and that is why i’m starting to learn from it
( )orbit March 6th
jquery is the best framework! i lov’in it! i have found a nice german jquery board!! it seem to be new, so give it a try
( )John McMullen March 6th
Yes, just another reason why jQuery rocks.
( )Amitay Horwitz March 6th
Still – mootools for me!
( )crysfel March 6th
hehehehehehe…. i like mootools too. but i work whit both
( )Jem March 7th
agreed! wish i had more time to toy with jquery too, its definitely a framework a bit better suited for beginners, i think mootools takes a bit more initiative to get into since its very developer-driven!
Moksha Solutions March 6th
wow thanks for it
( )iPad March 6th
Jeffrey we can use jQueryUI in the ThemeForest submits? great post…
( )Tom March 6th
Looks like an article for the sake of an article. C’mon Jeff, where’s the quality stuff you normally post? You better not go all sell-out with this tuts+ stuff.
( )Adel March 7th
Great tut Jeff .. !!
( )Adel March 7th
awesome… love it..
( )thax Jeff
Tommie March 7th
Really digg the ThemeRoller firefox dev tool that you can access anywhere and easily create your own style.
Plus it uses CSS3 round borders (finally no more silly images). Sure, it doesn’t support Internet Explorer but to be honest I’m sick and tired of IE to not have the support for CSS3 (and other stuff too for that matter) which other browsers have today.
( )efazati March 7th
really its good
( )your website is beter than what i can imagine dear
but i have question
why your page rank is zero ?
its for google?????/???????????
Chris Simpson March 9th
its probably because this used to be nettuts.com now its hosted as a subdomain of tutsplus.com, so needs time to establish its rank again .
most of Google’s indexed links have updated now, and the site receives a lot of traffic and link so i doubt it’ll be too long before the rank starts to rise.
( )jedrek March 7th
I Use Datapicker and Dialog (like confirm box) form jQuery UI in my web application – it’s awesome!
( )Tim March 7th
how about some moo love
( )Nicolas March 8th
Great article Jeffrey !
( )Alex March 8th
wow! this is amazing, how have I never heard of this
( )Eric March 9th
Looking forward to trying out that CSS framework!
( )Mikael March 10th
So basically this page is a copy of the jQueryUI blog, huh ?
( )Behrang March 10th
jQuery is great…same as your tutorial…
( )mufti March 10th
Nice UI Library, i love it
( )Julius Caamic March 11th
Combination of jQuery and CI will rock the world wde web!
( )- do you agree?
Martyn March 11th
This does look great, I kinda need to get started learning this quite urgently because theres so much I could use this for.
( )Feedweaver Your RSS reader March 12th
Cool, I am going to check that out
( )Rahul Chowdhury March 15th
jQuery is the best Javascript Library ever. I am planning to use it in one of my projects.
( )jo March 15th
jQuery … out of control, this is hottt!!!
( )Christian Molina March 16th
Nice Article
( )Dean Craig April 7th
I’m loving this! I’d never realised how good and easy jQuery is/was to use!!
( )Javascript Guy June 7th
Is it worth just learning jQuery first, or can I progress with jQuery and jQueryUI in parallel?
( )emke 7i9i July 4th
whaaa great
( )Arun Shivaram July 5th
I’ve used jQuery , but never tried out jQuery UI. I think its time to take a look at that atleast now.
( )renganathan July 22nd
i am lot of jquery using it is very useful sites creaing using thanks
( )erkasoft web tasarim September 6th
I love jquery and using in my applications. Jquery themes are very useful, also you can build nice looking and usable web applications with jquery.
( )