I've been very fortunate to have met some very smart people through my involvement with the jQuery Project and two of those are Karl Swedberg & Jonathan Chaffer. Apart from being really awesome developers, they're just all-around good people and so when Duane Moraes of Packt Publishing asked me if I'd do a review of their jQuery books, authored by Karl & Jonathan, the answer was easy.

I've started to read the books already and I do have to say that I'm immediately impressed. The style is similar to the way that Learningjquery.com is structured using real-world examples to get the concepts across. This should be a great read.

You can get more info below by clicking the images or the book titles and visiting Packt's website. My review will follow in the near future.

Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

The jQuery Reference Guide

The jQuery UI team needs your help in ensuring that jQuery UI v1.5 is rock solid. So they're conducting a Worldwide Sprint in order to get as much help as possible and get jQuery UI launched.

"The jQuery UI Team is pleased to announce its first Worldwide Sprint, to take place next Friday and Saturday, March 14-15, 2008. Two full days of testing, fixes, documentation, and general getting-stuff-done. Our goal is to get the jQuery UI 1.5 release (alpha, beta) ready for final, and we invite any and all to help. Whether you have an hour, or an afternoon, come and run really fast with us."

Details of the sprint can be found here with specifics on how you can help:

jQuery UI Worldwide Sprint

Repost from my Ajaxian.com posting:

The jQuery UI team announced today the release of alpha versions of jQuery UI 1.5a and jQuery Enchant 1.0a! The projects aim to address the need for a strong set of UI controls and effects to complement the jQuery JavaScript library.

I'm very happy to announce the first alpha release of both jQuery UI 1.5 and jQuery Enchant 1.0 to all the adventurous guys out there. This is a huge update - the whole API has been standardized and updated, and many of the plugins have been completely rewritten. jQuery Enchant is the missing part of UI: A library completely devoted to rich effects. It already features all effects you know from scriptaculous/interface, as well as many more great additions: color animations, class animations and highly configurable effects.

Taking a much more cautious approach this time around, the team has made it clear that this is an alpha release which will go through further testing and has requested heavy community involvement to ensure solid libraries are released in a final version.

The code and demos for the two libraries can be found here:

jQuery UI:

http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery.ui-1.5a.zip
http://ui.jquery.com/1.5a/demos/

jQuery Enchant:

http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery.enchant-1.0a.zip
http://ui.jquery.com/enchant/1.0a/demos/

It's important to note that both jQuery UI and Enchant require the newly jQuery v1.2.3 which was released last night.

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.2.3.js
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.2.3.min.js
http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.2.3.pack.js

Ben Nadel described it perfectly:

I have been using jQuery for a while now and the high has still not worn off. Even now, after I know what to expect, I find myself stopping in the middle of event wiring and thinking to myself, "This is so darn easy!" How is it possible that I'm still surprised as to how little jQuery code is required to make some really awesome stuff. It's just bananas. When I code in jQuery I am overwhelmed with this feeling that things are just falling into place. It's not like an adrenaline rush or anything - I'm trying to think of how to explain it... it's like when you think of something really funny to say and you're just waiting for your turn in the conversation and this feeling of anticipation builds inside of you; it's like that; it's like you have this anticipation of greatness. Now, not to say that the outcome of the coding will actually be great, but that the use of jQuery is so empowering that you kind of just assume that greatness will ensue.

Just a little stream of consciousness for you.

Link to Ben's original posting: jQuery And The Anticipation Of Greatness

Hot on the heels of the jQuery v1.1.4 release, John Resig and the jQuery team put the pedal to the metal and announced their newest release, jQuery v1.2.

This is a massive new release of jQuery that's been a long time in the making - and it's ready for your consumption!

This release is feature packed adding such new features as:

• Cross-domain script access
• Support for JSONP
• Numerous new traversal methods
• em/% Animations
• Color Animations
• Purple-include style .load()
• Queue control for animations

Following the tradition of "playing nice with other libraries", jQuery v1.2 now provides the ability to define a custom namespace for the events expando, thus adding one more method of ensuring that jQuery developers can successfully work in a multi-library environment. John Resig had this to say:

It's incredibly important for us, and our users, that the jQuery library work in any JavaScript environment. In jQuery 1.2 you can now depend on the fact that jQuery will protect itself from outside code influences, and libraries, even going so far as to protect itself from other versions of jQuery that might be running on the same page. Knowing that your copy of jQuery will always behave the way you expect it, no matter what the platform, is the cornerstone of the project.

Along those same lines of working for the community, the team has provided jQuery developers with an easy way to migrate into jQuery v1.2 by providing a compatibility plugin. With some functionality being removed in jQuery v1.2 release, including this plugin allows developers to have all of the features that were removed in the newest release.

The full release notes provide details about all of these new features.

You can get the latest release of JQuery below:

jQuery 1.2: (How To Upgrade)

• jQuery Minified (14kb with Gzipping)
• jQuery Packed (26kb)
• jQuery Regular (77kb)

Plugins:

• jQuery 1.1 Compatibility Plugin
• XPath Compatibility Plugin
• Color Animation Plugin

As if a new major release wasn't enough to whet your appetite, on Sunday, September 16th, the new jQuery UI effects library will be released to the public. The library will include:

• Draggables
• Droppables
• Resizables
• Shadows
• Sliders
• Sortables
• Tabs
• Accordions
• Selectables
• Trees
• Modals

All completely documented, demoed, themed, and 100% Free Open Source Software.

Here's a sneak peak at what to expect:

Lead developer of jQuery UI, Paul Bakaus, had this to say:

We worked hard over the last three months to make UI a seamless, rock-solid solution for many interface situations. It's nearly there - featuring many core level modules, ready-to-go widgets and custom, unique themes. To make the experience even nicer, the team created a smart downloader, a playground with demo apps and tests and of course documentation. We are pretty excited about our release on Sunday - be sure not to miss it!

Over the last year, I've posted about how top CF developers have been flocking to the jQuery javascript library. jQuery is truly an awesome piece of work and I can completely understand why their loving it; ease-of-use, awesome community, exceptional documentation, lightweight, & feature rich.

Add another hot name to the list of jQuery lovers. Peter Bell has jumped on the bandwagon and is loving jQuery. Now, make no mistake about it, Peter Bell knows his stuff. His posts range from dissecting frameworks to domain specific modeling. He posts about very advanced topics so when he says he likes jQuery, that speaks volumes to me.

I'm really happy to see Peter getting into jQuery and hope to see others in the CF community join in.

Now that Rob Gonda and I are cranking up development of AjaxCFC once again, which will inlude jQuery v1.2 under the hood, I think you'll be seeing more jQuery love around the corner.

If you're interested in learning more about jQuery, I've created a list of links that will hopefully help new jQuery users find the resources they need to get up-to-speed with the library:

jQuery Main Site:
http://jquery.com/

The compressed & uncompressed code:
http://code.google.com/p/jqueryjs/downloads/list

SVN Info:
http://code.google.com/p/jqueryjs/source

Plugins & UI Widgets/Controls:
http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins (old page)
http://jquery.com/plugins/ (new repository)

Documentation:
http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page
http://www.visualjquery.com/
http://jquery.bassistance.de/api-browser/

Magazine:
http://www.visualjquery.com/magazine/

Mailing Lists- jQuery Support, community news:
http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-en

Mailing Lists - Issues involving future development of jQuery (not support-related):
http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-dev

Project Blog:
http://jquery.com/blog/

Learning Resources:
http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials
http://www.learningjquery.com/
http://15daysofjquery.com/

Sites Using jQuery:
http://docs.jquery.com/Sites_Using_jQuery

Now that Rob Gonda has officially volunteered...er I mean asked me to join the AjaxCFC team, its time get this badboy updated.

Here are some immediate things that we're doing:

• We're going back to calling the library AjaxCFC instead of AjaxCFC for jQuery or AjaxCFC for DWR. This is more of a consistency thing.
• AjaxCFC is currently using jQuery v1.1.2, two releases behind the current v1.1.4. With jQuery v1.2, along with the new jQuery UI effects library, coming out VERY soon, we're more inclined to wait to update AjaxCFC until these libs are out the door. If you feel that you ABSOLUTELY need a version of AjaxCFC using jQuery v1.1.4, let us know and we'll weigh the benefits. Supporting two different versions of jQuery isn't ideal, especially for such a small project but if there's a real need, we'll consider it.
• This is a BIG one. This will be the last release of AjaxCFC to contain DWR code. All DWR code will be deprecated to help improve maintainability, consistency and stability.

We're really looking forward to your feedback on this. I know there was mention of MG:U integration and we're definitely open to that. Also, considering that Rob is part of the ColdBox team, there may some work done to integrate with that as well.

Again, please let us know what you want and we'll see how we can accommodate it.

Ajaxian is reporting about a very neat and cool bookmarklet, XRay, that helps you visually get information about specific elements on your page. The site best describes its functionality as "a free cross browser tool (a bookmarklet) that lets you see the box model in action for any element, letting you see beneath the skin of any web page. Just click the XRAY button to instantly answer those vital questions: where is the top and left of this element? how big is each margin? how big is the padding? how wide and high is the content box?".

I tried this out and it was VERY cool. While there's some overlap with Firebug, this is definitely being added to my toolkit. The only downside is that it doesn't work on IE.

http://westciv.com/xray/

Tane Piper today released v1.3 of his jQuery mapping plugin with the following major updates:

• Added support for creating Yahoo! Maps, can create Map, Satallite or Hybrid. Check out available options below
• Added support for creating points on Yahoo! maps.
• Added support for creating Polylines on Yahoo! maps.
• Added support for GeoRSS files on both Yahoo! and Google maps, as well as existing KML support for Google, method
• Name was changed from .addKml to .addRss
• Moved directions search out of main namespace, now function that is called from within plugin by providing fields
• Added Yahoo! Geocoding support

This was a fairly big update and allows developers to take advantage of either Google or Yahoo maps from one codebase!

Tane is already working on v1.4 which will include:

• Add in custom icon support for points.
• Add support for Google Points Manager
• Add support for overlays

and possible support Microsoft Live maps.

You can grab the latest code via Google SVN and see a live demo here.

First up:

Jim Priest does an excellent job of reviewing the first couple of chapter's of Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer's newly released jQuery book,

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

My favorite quote from his review is:

Glancing at the Table of Contents - I'm happy to note there are no basic introductory 'HTML/Javascript' chapters (no fluff!) you dive right into a simple jQuery script where you manipulate some CSS.

That's what I would expect from a book written by Karl; good content and no fluff.

Be sure to checkout the review here:

http://www.thecrumb.com/2007/07/13/5-minute-jquery-book-review/

and support Karl's hard work by ordering the book here:

http://www.packtpub.com/jQuery/book/mid/100407j4kh3d

Next:

If you've been in development for awhile and are serious about coding, then you have to have heard of and/or read Dr. Dobb's Journal magazine. Dr. Dobb's magazine is truly the best publication for hardcore developers that want to learn new techniques for improving their development skills. It tackles a variety of programming languages and really gets to the juicy stuff without boring you with mundane commentary.

Well, you can now add jQuery to the list of frameworks reviewed by DDJ. That's right, DDJ published a 4 page online article about jQuery titled Getting Started with jQuery.

It runs you through the basic steps of getting up to speed with the jQuery library and they do a good job of explaining the basics. Its definitely a good read for those starting out with jQuery.

Having a well-known magazine such as DDJ publish this article is a big step for the jQuery project and we appreciate DDJ taking the time to put up such a great writeup.

Last but not least:

Developer extraordinaire Remy Sharp, posted on the jQuery list about a fun app he developed called Speech Bubbles. Using bookmarklets, it would allow you to attach speech bubbles to specific parts of web pages. It was REALLY cool and Remy got a lot of kudos from the jQuery community.

Well, it looks like others have also fallen in love with this app as Ajaxian has now picked up on this and made a post about Remy's work. Go check it out here:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/friday-fun-with-speech-bubbles

and show your support for Remy.