jQuery

Although it’s a bit embarrassing, my first programming experience was trying to build a customized and skinnable mediaplayer with Visual Basic 6. This probably was around 1999 or so, and although the media player was quite nice in terms of features, it had countless timers and totally killed every CPU by just playing a simple song.

After this experiment I soon realized that I wanted to do something with the internet. One of my hobbies was (and still is) japanese anime and manga, and there wasn’t really a great community around it in germany at that time, so I took the challenge and created a community called Anime-Domain as my first big web project. It was my little playground, and after 10 revisions and designs it grew so popular that it was featured in german print magazines and had some 10k unique visitors a day. This was the time where I knew that by doing web development, you could reach many people very quickly with what you do, so I decided to continue to go that route.

I initially came to the jQuery project while searching for a good solution to power the web applications of a big german client. As I was specifically responsible for building out a lot of the frontend logic and interaction, I quickly found out about Interface, a collection of interface plugins developed by Stefan Petre. I soon realized there was a lot of work involved to make it stable for our environment, so I invested a lot of time into bugfixes and feature stabilization, and later even planned the next generation of Interface, Interface 2 with Stefan. However, it was then that Stefan moved on with founding his own business and ran out of time, so Interface was discontinued.

I would build the first version of an official jQuery interface addition, since I already had quite some experience from working on Interface. He and the jQuery community wanted to have it done in three months for the Ajax Experience conference in Boston, which was nearly impossible after a quick analysis of my workload. I had a day job, and I estimated I would need to work on it 3-4 hours everyday. After some days of consideration, I finally said ‘yes’, and for a three month period woke up every day at 6am to work for 3 hours on jQuery UI and then go to my day job. Now I can say that it was worth it

I switched to Mac hardware around a year ago and I’m totally in love with it. All components work together nicely, and so far, I never had to return my Macbook Pro to the Apple Store because of an issue. However, I’m still using Windows through Parallels because OSX, while visually nice and stable, has fundamental usability flaws.

One of these flaws is the Finder. I recently worked on the jQuery UI Selectables in the labs version, and once again saw that the Finder had great flaws when it comes down to selection. For instance, if you select multiple items and click on one of them, the multiple selection isn’t cleared. Also, my tools that I love for windows simply don’t have an alternative yet

For editing files, I love the e texteditor (yep, the name is “e”). It basically started as a textmate clone for windows, but since then grew into something much greater. One of the features I can’t live without now is there great multiple selection support. Hold down CTRL, select a couple words through double clicking and then type over all of them. Is that cool or what? On a sidenote, on one of my talks in Japan the audience asked why I’m so insane to use a Textmate clone through an emulated Windows on OSX - I showed them this exact feature, and they were all amazed.

Other than that, I like TortoiseSVN, even if it slows down the Explorer, I love Photoshop, especially the new version with hardware acceleration, Trillian Astra for instant messaging, Gmail for email, Firefox 3 for browsing, VideoLAN for playing video, Keynote for preparing presentations, and WinSCP/Putty to do server administration. Phew, I guess that’s about it

There’s a lot of movement right now. We finally pushed out 1.7 3 days ago, which we believe is a solid foundation for everything that’s coming in in the next couple of months. While 1.7 was a stability and foundation release, the next releases will concentrate around features, so expect to see many more components soon. Some examples are the colorpicker, menu, grid, tooltip and tree widgets.

Additionally, my personal goal is to target more platforms, for example the iPhone. Early test implementations I did show that it’s fairly doable to support the touch events, and therefore make all jQuery UI interaction compatible with mobile devices.

Additionally, I’m working on a brand new lab section to be able to push feature development without any restrictions. This allows us to work on anything we find is cool, but maybe not on the roadmap.

The syntax of connect function is

$.connect(sourceObj/*object*/, sourceFunc/*string*/, callObj/*object*/, callFunc/*string or Func*/)

sourceObj(optional) is the object of the source function to which we want to connect

sourceFunc is the function name to which we want to connect

callObj(optional) is the object which we want to use for the handler function

callFunc is the function that we want to execute when sourceFunc is executed.

Here sourceObj, callObj are optional for the global functions.

suppose if your sourceFunc is global function then no need to pass the sourceObj or you can use null or self

suppose if your callObj is global function then no need to pass the callObj or you can use null or self

ex:

// fun1, fun2 are global functions

1. $.connect('fun1',fun2)

2. $.connect(null,'fun1',fun2)

3. $.connect(self,'fun1',fun2)

4. $.connect('fun1',null,fun2)

5. $.connect('fun1',self,fun2)

6. $.connect(self,'fun1',null,fun2)