45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience

JavaScript libraries have made huge leaps and bounds in helping developers write code and develop products more quickly. jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, with powerful tools that improve the user’s interaction with Web applications. jQuery has an additional advantage in that it allows developers to select elements on a page using CSS-like syntax.

To help you take it up a notch, we share below some methods that can help you give visitors to your website an amazing user experience. Here are over 45 impressive jQuery plug-ins and techniques that have been recently created and that could make the development of your next website an easier and more interesting experience than the last.

Comparing Javascript compression techniques

As rich web applications are being built with larger JavaScript code bases, the need for JavaScript compression to keep bandwidth and page load times as small as possible is becoming more important for faster load times and more enjoyable user experiences.

There are many tools available that can help you compress your JavaScript code but it can be time consuming and difficult to analyze which tool works the best for a given situation. The CompressorRater web application shows aggregated statistics on the general level of compression in all these tools, and allows developers to easily play with and compare the different tools on their own JavaScript code without having to set up all the tools on their own.

The CompressorRater tool compares the following compression techniques, both with and without the affects of additional gzip compression that are supported natively by modern web browsers.

• JSMin is a conservative compressor, written several years ago by Douglas Crockford. It is considered safe (especially if you verify your code with JSLint first– an excellent thing to do anyway) because it doesn’t attempt to change any variable names.
• Dojo shrinksafe is a very popular Java based JavaScript compressor that parses the JavaScript using the rhino library and crunches local variable names.
• Packer by Dean Edwards, is also a very popular JavaScript compressor, that can go beyond regular compression and also add advanced on-the-fly decompression with a JavaScript runtime piece.
• the YUI Compressor is a newer compressor written by Julien Lecomte, that aims to combine the safety of JSMin with the higher compression levels achieved by Dojo Shrinksafe. Like Dojo shrinksafe, it is written in Java and based on the rhino library.

jQuery – a fast and easy to use Javascript library

jQuery is an open-source Javascript library that makes writing Javascript quicker, easier and cleaner. The library has support for traversing HTML documents, handling events, performing animations, and adding Ajax interactions to your web pages. It also offers all of the usual fading, sliding, animation effects you expect from a JS library these days.

It’s lightweight, weighing in at a not-so hefty 20kb and supports CSS1-3 and basic XPath.

There’s a great tutorial here to get you started.