#jquery

If you're building with AI right now, connecting agents to tools, wiring up APIs, trying to get Claude to talk to your database, you're living through something weirdly familiar (I think). It's the same chaotic, fragmented, "why is this so hard" energy that web developers felt in the mid-2000s when every browser implemented JavaScript differently and cross-browser compatibility was a prayer, not a promise.

A tidy repository of jQuery plugins

A tidy repository of jQuery plugins

Chosen is a jQuery plugin that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly.

Chosen is a jQuery plugin that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly.

DevDocs is an all-in-one API documentation reader for developers.

DevDocs is an all-in-one API documentation reader for developers.

hColumns is a jQuery plugin that looks like Mac OS X Finder's column view for the hierarchical data.

hColumns is a jQuery plugin that looks like Mac OS X Finder's column view for the hierarchical data.

Let's keep this short. Too few websites log JavaScript errors. Let's build a simple system to track client-side errors.

Let's keep this short. Too few websites log JavaScript errors. Let's build a simple system to track client-side errors.

While CSS3 allows us to rotate letters, it is quite complicated to arrange each letter along a curved path. Arctext.js is a jQuery plugin that let's you do exactly that. Based on Lettering.js, it calculates the right rotation of each letter and distributes the letters equally across the imaginary arc of the given radius.

Tab Override is a plugin for WordPress and jQuery that allows tabs to be entered into textareas. In WordPress, it affects the HTML editor on admin pages. The WordPress plugin was originally written by Mathew Tinsley.

Chosen is a JavaScript plugin that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly. It is currently available in both jQuery and Prototype flavors.

The goal: a 2-5k library that handles most basic drudge work with a nice API so you can concentrate on getting stuff done.

Mimics a custom "appear" event, which fires when an element scrolls into view or otherwise becomes visible to the user.

"In this post we’ll be looking at ways you can put together a toolkit for large-scale jQuery application development by identifying the options you have available at the moment for dependency management, MVC with jQuery, templating, testing, minification and more."

"Masonry is a layout plugin for jQuery. Think of it as the flip side of CSS floats. Whereas floating arranges elements horizontally then vertically, Masonry arranges elements vertically then horizontally according to a grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall."

"Pikachoose is a lightweight Jquery plugin that allows easy presentation of photos with options for slideshows, navigation buttons, and auto play. Pikachoose is designed to be easily installed, easy to setup, and well… all around easy. Creating an image gallery shouldn’t be a complex thing. I’ve created a new plugin that I’m packaging with PikaChoose called SliderJS. "

"Lazy loader is a jQuery plugin written in JavaScript. It delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded before user scrolls to them. This is opposite of image preloading."

"Let’s walk through the easy way, where you don’t need to learn how to really use git. In another post, we’ll cover some best practices for contributing with git."

"jQuery 1.4.2 added a set of new functions: $.delegate() and $.undelegate(). $.delegate() is a hybrid between $.bind() and $.live(). Here is an example of how the three functions differ, and how to implement $.delegate() in existing code."

"When you bind a "live" event it will bind to all current and future elements on the page (using event delegation). For example if you bound a live click to all "li" elements on the page then added another li at a later time - that click event would continue to work for the new element (this is not the case with bind which must be re-bound on all new elements). "

"Underscore is a utility-belt library for Javascript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in Javascript objects. It's the tie to go along with jQuery's tux."

"jQuery pageSlide was inspired by the UI work of Aza Raskin. In his recent posts regarding concepts for Firefox Mobile and a mouse-based Ubiquity, Aza introduced the idea of sliding (or "throwing") content aside to reveal a secondary content pane."

"I'd call myself an "intermediate" jQuery user and I thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I've learned over the past year. The article also ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be so I'll start with a table of contents so you can skip to the bits you're interested in."

"I’m sure you all know that it’s possible to create plugins and extend various aspects of the jQuery JavaScript library but did you know you could also extend the capabilities of it’s selector engine?"

"Timeago is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to support automatically updating fuzzy timestamps (e.g. "4 minutes ago" or "about 1 day ago")"

Interesting perspective, with which I agree somewhat. Though, there's certainly something to be said for building a domain-specific language of convenience for DOM manipulation. "The more time someone spends building applications with a library like Prototype, the further they get from Javascript, and the more dependent they become on the library. By contrast, time spent using YUI tends to breed developers who are experts in Javascript, and that skill is far more useful than being an expert in a particular library."

"Parallax turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way."

"jQuery-PHP is a PHP library that allows to tie jQerry with PHP most natural way. You don't need to think in terms of transmission, parsing and other boring staff. Now you have a bridge that brings DOM right onto your server :) and you can ealisy manipulate it in jQuerry-style way." This seems like one of the worst ideas - maybe it's just me, but "shortcuts" and other encapsulations of client-side JS within server-side code-generation in PHP / Ruby / Python / Perl / etc seems like one of the worst forms of magical obfuscation there is in webdev. Of course, I also feel the same way about most psuedo-ORM SQL / database abstractions.

"Chain.js is a jQuery plugin, providing data-binding capability that allows you to generate web contents automatically by binding your data to html."

"This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript. "

"jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X's Growl Framework works."

"Data visualization in HTML has long been tricky to achieve. Past solutions have involved non-standard plugins, proprietary behavior, and static images. But this has changed with the recent growth in support for the new HTML Canvas element, which provides a native drawing API that can be addressed with simple Javascript. This article is a proof of concept for visualizing HTML table data with the canvas element."

"Maybe you should take some time to sit down and actually try to use and work with other libraries, because while you were out bashing and slandering us we were writing rock solid code, sharing, collaborating, and discussing the future of the web."

"Olmo is no longer a part of the Mootools development team."

"Fitting with the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript, we’ll start with a semantically marked up list of restaurants, then use JavaScript to add the map, look up the restaurant locations and plot them as markers."

"auto tumble your delicious links"

"I’m going to try to explain why jQuery should be of interest to experienced programmers as well."

"The jQuery Taconite Plugin allows you to easily make multiple DOM updates using the results of a single AJAX call. It processes an XML command document that contain instructions for updating the DOM."

Not the sequel to jQuery, but a Ruby-esque domain-specific language demo for constructing jQuery calls.

"Here's a fun fact. jQuery 1.0 has been released nearly one year after it was first conceived as a post in my weblog. Funny how those things work."

"Sorry, I'm just mesmerized by this code: [0,1,1,1,0][xml.readyState] that's seriously one of the coolest boolean ideas that I've seen."