Andre Lewis on Tech

You may know from my previous posts that I've been moving away from Prototype/Scriptaculous and toward jQuery for JS/AJAX programming, primarily for jQuery's powerful selectors, code-shrinking chaining model, and light weight.

jQuery also has an active development community, working off of a plugin architecture which allows incremental inclusion of only the modules you need. The community is coming out with some awesome plugins, which will further shrink the functional gap between jQuery and Prototype/Scriptaculous. Below are three exceptional ones from the jQuery mailing list:

	Draggable, sortable lists All the major functions are here: dragging, sorting, target outlines, drop zone highlighting, drag-time ghosting.
	Selectables Define a rectangle by clicking and dragging, and select the elements which fall within the rectangle -- just like selecting icons on your desktop or a group of photos in Picassa.
	Accessible, unobtrusive tabs Render a nice tabbed structure with one line of Javascript. The markup on which the plugin operates is very natural -- the tabs are rendered from a list of anchor tags, exactly how you would (for example) markup a table of contents.