A Path Less Taken

One of the great things about Open Source tools is the wealth and variety of choices. It’s a blessing and a curse all at once. Here are some of my random thoughts on some PHP and JavaScript versus scenarios.

Thanks to kippt.com and more specifically WebOlymp’s jQuery Plugins list here are some more interesting jQuery plugins.

It’s been a while since I posted about this and as I look for sliders I thought I would update you on some additional cool jQuery Plugins that I’ve come across. Enjoy!

• Nivo Slider – The worlds’ most awesome jQuery slider.
• arbor.js – a graph visualization library using web workers and jQuery
• Awkard Showcase – They call it a Content Slider, but as they state it can do more then just slide the content with tooltips, thumbnails, dynamic height and lots more.
• Nice & Clean Sliding Login Panel – Nice & Clean Sliding Login Panel Built With JQuery.

Ok, right off I have to tell you this article is a biased perspective on the difference between MooTools and jQuery. The bias is not mine, but that of the author. Aaron Newton (of Clientcide fame?) and a core committer to the MooTools Javascript Framework penned jQuery vs MooTools. Apparently it was a blog post of such gravity that Aaron decided it needed it’s own domain name. Sweet! You might wonder why Aaron wants to spend so much energy comparing MooTools to jQuery, a competing Javascript Framework. I think the answer is simple. jQuery is kicking the proverbial dog dodo out of other Javascript Frameworks in terms of user base and general popularity.

qTip is an excellent jQuery plugin created by Craig Thompson. It is built on top of the jQuery Javascript library and allows web developers to build flexible, well formatted and easy to use tool tips. I decided to use qTip for my latest web app and was able to get up and running pretty quickly. I did run into one issue that I thought was worth pointing out to help you avoid the same sticking point that I encountered with my approach.