JQuery UI 1.8 Final Released | Hacker News Reader

JQuery UI 1.8 Final Released

blog.jqueryui.com

43 pointsBrentley_1111 comments

And it's already on the Google CDN. http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/#jqueryUI

Curious, does the Google CDN version contain all widgets, effects, and themes? Or what?

No themes but the widgets and effects are there.

themes are definitely up.

  http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.0/themes/base/jquery-ui.css

this will get you the base theme. just replace base with any of the other theme names.

so for vader:

  http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.0/themes/vader/jquery-ui.css

basically:

  http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.0/themes/#THEMENAME#/jquery-ui.css

Cool.

So the question (for me) of size/speed comes down to: is it faster/better to build my own jQuery UI js file with selected components or to use the full file from Google's CDN?

The former option has the benefit of being smaller, while the latter has the benefit of being hosted by Google's fast servers and there's a decent probability the client already has it cached.

when using jquery and other google hosted frameworks, i tend to use them from google CDN because a lot of the time not only is it faster, but it tends to be faster for traffic from all over the place. i have a site hosted in hong kong and most of the traffic is from japan, africa, and south america, so obviously the performance will differ for different users. but when i use jquery from google CDN, the performance tends to be similar across users.

yes they are (well, for 1.7.2 anyway):

   http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.7.2/themes/#THEMENAME#/jquery-ui.css

For anyone curious about the quality assurance effort that goes into jQuery UI, take a look at the history of the new autocomplete widget.

I have been following since it was an standalone plugin, and the author cleaned up the design and code so much just to qualify for inclusion into UI. Perfect.

Another high-quality piece of code is jQuery Cycle: http://malsup.com/jquery/cycle/

It still (like most of the widgets) only goes 90% of the way and lacks things like gmail/facebook-style multiple items by comma separation. The worst thing is that the properties exist (multiple: true) but are not utilised as yet. Instead when an item is selected you have to dump it in a recipient field.

Looks like they got Autocompletion right.

I've written my own re-usable widget but I'll probably switch to this next time I need an autocomplete box.

I've updated http://cdncatalog.com/ to reference 1.8. This includes links to the themes as well.

Alas, this is still a themed UI framework that doesn't style ubiquitous basic form fields like checkboxes and radio buttons, although they do get points for adding button support this time and (if I understand the hints on the linked page properly) planning to add more in future.

Curiously, ExtJS seems to have similar limitations: you can style all kinds of things, but there doesn't seem to be any support for theming of the most basic UI controls.

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