jQuery links

[Craig Buchek]

Here are the web pages that I used last night in my presentation.
(Plus some bonus pages.)

http://www.slideshare.net/wycats/jquery-presentation-to-rails-developers-110063/

The slide show I went through. Pretty good stuff in there, and covers
some Rails-specific topics. There are some other slide shows on the
right of the page you might want to look at


http://jquery.com/

jQuery home page. Downloads are available from here. You should get
the minified version for serving to clients (or just have clients pull
it directly from Google Code). You should pull the "regular" version
if you want to read the code and comments.


http://docs.jquery.com

Full documentation of the API. They are divided up into sections,
making things pretty easy to find. Each function shows/describes all
the arguments, and has a demo with example code. It's all pretty well
done. I use this and the Visual jQuery page for 90%+ of my coding.


http://visualjquery.com/

A nice GUI interface to the API documentation. It's easier to use, and
quicker than the official docs, but I don't think it's quite as
extensive. Note that the documentation is currently for a few versions
back.


http://ui.jquery.com/

The official UI widget plugin/extension to jQuery. It's got some demos
of all the features. Probably not quite as complete/nice as the
Scriptaculous UI widgets yet, but easier to use.


http://ui.jquery.com/1.5a/demos/

Demos for the upcoming version of jQuery UI. The resizing looks really
nice. The others are generally OK. There's still some room for
improvement on most of the widgets.


http://ui.jquery.com/enchant/1.0a/demos/

Enchant is the official special effects plugin/extension. There's no
real web page for it yet, but the demos show that they've got a full
set of effects. Just about anything you might want.


http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins
http://plugins.jquery.com/

There are a lot of plugins available to extend jQuery. They vary
greatly in quality. But if you're looking for some functionality, look
here first.


http://yehudakatz.com/2007/01/31/using-jquery-in-rails-part-i/

Blog post by the same author as the slide show. He's got a lot of
other posts on jQuery, and some on Rails. He's finishing up the book
"jQuery in Action". Probably the biggest expert on jQuery plus Rails.
Probably pretty up there on jQuery alone as well.


http://drnicwilliams.com/2006/08/23/ajax-on-rails-prototype-vs-jquery/

Another blog entry. Dr. Nic has written quite a few very cool Rails
plugins.


http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2006/06/again/

A blog entry explaining the DOM-ready issue. (Also see the previous
article on the issue that he references.) Dean Edwards is one of the
top JavaScript experts in the world. He's got a lot of really good log
entries. He's got a library called IE7.js that will make IE5 and IE6
almost completely equivalent to IE7 in terms of CSS functionality.


http://ennerchi.com/projects/jrails

One of the jQuery for Rails plugins. This one seems to provide
replacements for all the Protoype/Scriptaculous based helpers, as well
as RJS. Might be the best route to eliminating Prototype in favor of
jQuery. (They can easily co-exist, but that requires serving more
files/bandwidth.) There have been a few other jQuery+Rails plugins
released, but none seemed too extensive. Partly because it's not
really necessary -- it's easiest just to write the jQuery functions in
JavaScript files.


http://www.slideshare.net/simon/jquery-in-15-minutes/

Nice short slide show. Covers a few things that I did not, that are
fairly important to know about using jQuery.


Enjoy,
Craig