Has been released today version 1.7 of jquery UI library. I have never used it so much but from this realease i think that UI becomes a valid options.
In my opinion the library has a big lack that is the fact that looks like the jquery team is not interested in developing also a data management tool to be use with the UI widgets but .... we can mix it with spry dataset or extjs stores.
Some of the biggest news from the jquery blog:
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jQuery 1.3 compatibility
jQuery 1.7 is the first release that is compatible with jQuery 1.3. That’s a good thing (if you can make the switch), since jQuery 1.3 brings major performance improvements to many areas of jQuery UI. Specifically, firing events, DOM operations, and getting element offsets have had massive performance improvements. More about the jQuery 1.3 release…
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Revamped and optimized plugins
In addition to a long list of bug fixes and improvements, we’ve refactored and optimized each plugin to use the cleanest HTML possible, with a flexible set of options to make it easy for developers to extend and tweak widgets. We’ve also added a new progress bar plugin in this release.
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CSS framework
jQuery UI 1.7 is built upon a brand new and powerful CSS framework that is designed to support not only jQuery UI’s own plugins, but also custom plugin development, so any developer can easily make their plugins ThemeRoller ready. It is a special kind of CSS framework that is aimed specifically at user interface development as opposed to overall page layout. The framework provides classes for commonly used UI elements, states, containers and icons and is manipulated by jQuery UI ThemeRoller. More about the jQuery UI CSS Framework…
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Themeroller v2
ThemeRoller has been completely redesigned to complement the new CSS framework and widget designs. ThemeRoller now resides in a vertical sidebar and has loads of new features. We also created a ThemeRoller Developer Tool (a bookmarklet, so you can bring ThemeRoller into any web page) and a Theme Switcher (so you can switch between themes with a simple drop-down box).
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Demos & Documentation
Maybe you’ve seen it already: We merged the top navigation links “Demos” and “Documentation” into a unified Demos & Documentation section, so it’s easy to browse demos and read the documentation all in one integrated experience. We’ve grouped demos of similar features and options together so you can easily tab from one to another and compare. As you navigate within a page, we update the URL to ensure accurate bookmarking and deep linking.
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Full offline documentation
Full documentation for each plugin is now included in the release. Just take a look at the /docs/ folder in the development bundle. There’s a separate (and simple) html file for each jQuery UI plugin method. There’s no styesheet for these files yet, but they’re quite functional even without. We’ll see about making it a little more like the website Demos & Documentation in a future release.
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Major website improvements
We refactored the download builder (using progressive enhancement, so it now works with JavaScript disabled) and integrated a base theme into the download along with a demo html file of all the widgets for easy integration. We refactored and improved the landing pages for the Development and Support sections to be more information-rich and up-to-date.
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CSS framework and themes on Google AJAX Libraries API
As before, the latest stable release of jQuery UI (now 1.7) is hosted on Google’s CDN. New in this release, however, Google is also hosting the new jQuery UI CSS Framework, as well as our current suite of pre-built themes: base, black-tie, blitzer, cupertino, dot-luv, excite-bike, hot-sneaks, humanity, mint-choc, redmond, smoothness, south-street, start, swanky-purse, trontastic, ui-darkness, ui-lightness, and vader.
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Themes bundle
You can now download all the ThemeRoller Gallery themes at once: jquery-ui-themes-1.7.zip. Or if you’re savvy with svn: http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.7/themes/.
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A new dedicated blog
If you’re reading this, you probably know it already. We finally made the switch to our very own blog at http://blog.jqueryui.com/, where we’ll regularly blog about development, theming, and more during each release. To link the jQuery and jQuery UI blogs, Richard Worth is starting a “This week in jQuery UI” series on the jQuery UI blog, while Karl Swedberg (of learningjquery.com) will do a “This week in jQuery” series on the jQuery blog, and they will link to eachother.
