Ajaxular - All Things AJAX

The jQuery team has announced the first beta release of their new upcoming UI library - jQuery UI 1.5. This is a complete overhaul of the library, so you can expect to see some big changes. Here are some mentioned in the release notes:

• A Unified API
  
  

  The API has been updated for all UI components. It should now be very easy to use other plugins if you?re familiar with one of them. There is only one exposed method for every plugin - All other methods are called by passing in a String into the exposed method, the initialization of the plugin works by giving on a options hash as first argument. You can now change and get all options at a later point if you want to by using the new data method. Basic example for draggables:

  
$(..).draggable({...}); //Initialize the draggable
$(..).draggable("disable"); //Disable the draggable
$(..).data("cursor.draggable", "move") //Change the cursor during drag to 'move'


• Updated Docs
• Drag & Drop
  
  

  Draggables and Droppables have been completely refactored. It might now be the most non-destructive drag & drop implementation ever: The css position?s value will not be changed except for ?static?: That means that elements, that were static or relative, will not be forced into absolute positioning, which often destroyed layouts, especially when dealing with floats.

• Sliders
  
  

  The slider wasn?t refactored, but has been completely rewritten from scratch. While it?s still almost backwards compatible, it?s now very stable and simpler than ever: The moveTo method now only takes two arguments: The value you want to move the handle to and optionally the index of the handle you want to move. Want to retrieve a specific handle value? No problem, just call $(..).slider(?value?, index) .

  Even better, the slider now is completely keyboard accessible: You can now tab and focus each slider handle separately and move its position using the left/right keys. We also improved support for using the mouse: Clicking into a empty area now moves the focused handle to the clicked position, regardless on how many handles you have.

• Sortables
  
  

  Rewritten as well, the sortables now support a wide range of features you already know from draggables: cursor, zIndex, revert, opacity, axis, handles, containment and scrolling. Additional to that, you can now serialize your items to a url hash, and you now have the often requested ability to connect multiple sortables, so you can drag a node from one sortable to another.

• and more...

Check out the docs and cool demos below:

Mouse Interactions:

• drag
• dropping
• sorting
• selecting
• resizing

Reusable Widgets:

• accordions
• date pickers
• dialogs
• sliders
• tabs

Visit the jQuery Blog to read about this release and download the beta.

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