Discover jQuery

My current students in the Web development class, VC240, will want to bookmark this to come back to after the quarter is over. Let me start by telling you how I came across the problem that requires this solution. I needed to add a drop shadow effect to the outside container of a Web page. Easy enough, I’ll just create a repeating background with CSS and… Oh, I didn’t set up may divs to float the shadow on the outside. CSS3 will allow a border image but only in Firefox and Webkit or something like that and that wasn’t going to be good enough. So, a freind, Greg Ferrell, who just happens to be an avid jQuery fan turned me on to the possibility. This video pops up and I’m very sad to learn that it was published in Jan of this year and I apparently wasn’t paying attention. sometimes we get so consumed with current work that we forget to set a little time aside to learn new things that will inevitably lighten the load in the long run. Okay, enough mantra. This video talks about the plugins for Dreamweaver which don’t include the drop shadow effect but jQuery has a solution for that too found here before I ramble any further.

The available plugins at the time of this article are:

• jQuery UI Tabs
• jQuery UI Slider
• jQuery UI Calendar
• jQuery thickbox gallery
• jQuery UI Dialog
• jQuery UI Accordion
• Markitup HTML Editor
• lightbox gallery

So.. “I haven’t figured out HTML, JavaScript, PHP or CSS yet, can you give me a break?”

No. You need to see everything out there to make good decisions if you end up designing for the Web for a living. Like I said in class Monday, “Are you guys real nerds, or just pretending because your parents liked Weezer?” I should say that most of you delightfully surprised me. Learn to enjoy this kind of work for your own good. It’s fun to figure out some of this stuff and make products that are good AND functional.

What is jQuery exactly?

Well, there’s no point in recreating the wheel and I’m still soaking it all up but it’s basically a JavaScript libraby that interacts with HTML to create numerous effects. You can do visual effects, manipulate CSS and page elemnents etc. Here’s the Wikipedia article that gives more detail than I could pretend to have floating around in my head. [ “jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig.”-Wikipedia ]

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