jQuery Cheatsheet(s)

I noticed DZone has a really nice jQuery selector cheatsheet.  Unlike some others on the web – this one is fairly updated and was created by the same people who wrote jQuery In Action ( a great jQuery book BTW).  You have to jump through some DZone hoops to get it but it’s very nicely done and worth the trouble if you do a lot of jQuery and can’t remember everything! :)

I also turned up a few more:

• jQuery 1.2 Cheatsheet (PDF)
• jQuery Cheatsheet (wallpaper)

jQuery News: UI 1.5 and jQuerify Bookmarklet

jQuery UI 1.5 is out!  I really need to try some of these but with most of my projects having strict 508 issues – there hasn’t been any opportunities to experiment.  I like how much thought they are putting into things and it looks like more good stuff is planned for the future:

We’re already planning the next release and have a huge roadmap that contains plugins like grid, tooltips, menus, colorpickers, autocompletes and much more.

One of my favorite jQuery tools has also been updated.  Karl Swedberg has updated his ‘jQuery bookmarklet‘.  If you have ever found yourself working on a site without jQuery – you can ‘jQuerify’ it using Karl’s bookmarklet.

It’s a nice little tool that allows you to play around with jQuery on a page that doesn’t already have jQuery loaded and see the results immediately.

A great tool to use with Firebug!

Slow Blogging – Fast jQuery (1.2.6)

Blogging around here as been slow lately…

Today however I did manage to update an application I’m working on with the latest jQuery 1.2.6 and WOW what an improvement.  I’m using the Autocomplete and Validate plugins as well as a bunch of show/hide stuff and it’s noticeable faster.  It’s a REALLY long form and previously performance was a bit sluggish. Some of that may be due to my code not being as optimized as it could be but with the recent jQuery update things are much snappier overall.

I have no way to actually measure the difference but my ’seat-o-the-pants’ meter says it’s faster.

This month I’m also doing a jQuery presentation for our local AppDev group which I’m looking forward to and which I need to get started on!!

Getting The Latest jQuery and Plugins

Often times I find that a jQuery plugin’s download link may not be the latest and greatest. Lately I’ve been going directly to the source :)

You can browse the jQuery Subversion repository online. The nice thing is you can see exactly when the author last update anything by looking at the revision and age.

Click the file you want. A new Trac page will open showing you the source with line numbers, etc. Simply scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click “Plain Text”. This will open a plain text view of the source which you can then save locally.

Adobe Feeling the jQuery Goodness

Saw this on John Resig’s blog today where he is speaking about how important partnering with certain projects and companies has been for jQuery’s growth (there are also some great bits in there about open source software which I need to blog about in another post). What caught my eye is they are working with Adobe:

Adobe – This is one of our upcoming partners. We’ve been working with them to try and make sure that some of their upcoming releases go smoothly. This is a case where a corporation will be providing copies of jQuery for developers to use (a different use case for us, as this is typically coming from open source projects). We’ll be seeing a lot more from this partnership in the upcoming months, which will be exciting. They’ve been great about keeping communication open – conference calls, emails, and patches – a great partner.

Interesting to see Adobe going this way – they already have Spry, and ColdFusion included parts of ExtJS…

Go jQuery!

jQuery Validation Plugin Updated/Improved!

I was updating my application I’m working on to use the latest jQuery Validation plugin and was skimming through the documentation. One neat thing I noticed was this:

Using remote validation to help with captchas

• Remote validation to check if the user entered the correct captcha, without forcing him to submit the form first

That is a great idea! I know with some of these captchas I have a difficult time deciphering the text often confusing “Os” and zeros, etc. It would be great to get feedback before submitting the form on your successful interpretation of the image :)

Too bad my application doesn’t have a captcha :(