Interface

Over 70 simple incredibly effective recipes for taking control of Yahoo! User Interface Library like a Pro

• Easily develop feature-rich internet applications to interact with the user using various built-in components of YUI library
• Simple and powerful recipes explaining how to use and implement YUI 2.x components
• Gain a thorough understanding of the YUI tools
• Plenty of example code to help you improve your coding and productivity with the YUI Library
• Hands-on solutions that takes a practical approach to recipes

In Detail

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. Although you can create stylish Internet applications by modifying its default components, even advanced users find it challenging to create impressive feature-rich Internet applications using YUI.

This book will help you learn how to use YUI 2.x to build richer, more interactive web applications that impress clients and wow your friends. It has recipes explaining over twenty-five YUI components, showing how to use them, and how to configure them to meet your needs. Each covered component will have extractable code samples that showcase the common ways that the component is used.

The book starts by explaining the core features of YUI 2.x, the utilities that the rest of the library depends on and that will make your life easier. It then explains how to build UI components and make AJAX requests using the YUI framework. Each recipe will cover the most common ways to use a component, how to configure it, and then explain any other features that may be available. We wrap things up by looking at some of the recent beta components and explain how to use them, and how they may be useful on your web application.

For each of the recipes, there is an introductory example, then more advanced examples, followed by an explanation of how the component works and what YUI is doing. For more experienced developers, most recipes also include additional discussion of the solution, explaining to further customize and enhance the component.

This practical book, packed with easy-to-follow recipes, will help you create modern rich internet applications using the most powerful components of Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)

What you will learn from this book

• Understand how YUI 2.x works and what features are available
• Understand how YUI components interact with the DOM, and why
• Effortlessly search the DOM and listen for end-user events
• Simplify retrieving server-side data using AJAX and DataSource
• Learn how to load your scripts and CSS on demand
• Create sophisticated HTML-based panels, tooltips, and dialogs
• Make interactive inputs with AutoComplete
• Harness the power of drag and drop for your UI
• Build sortable, dynamic tables using DataTable
• Design richer user interfaces using YUI buttons and menus
• Show data hierarchies using the TreeView
• Explore some of the more recent beta components
• Take control of your UI as you master YUI 2.x

Approach

This book contains recipes that showcase the common components of YUI, providing suggested examples of use, and a detailed explanation. Except for the first three chapters, which cover the 3 components of YUI that form the foundation for all other components, this book is not meant to be read cover-to-cover. Each recipe is presented as a separate, standalone entity and reading of other prior recipes is not required. Each chapter tackles a particular component or set of related components, introducing the component and explaining how to use it.

Who this book is written for

If you are a web application developer and have some prior experience with or interest in using YUI 2.x to improve the UI of their web applications, then this book is for you. It assumes the reader has prior knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and basic understanding of how a website works. This book provides an easy-to-use guide for implementing YUI 2.x components, and does not require an expertise in either JavaScript or YUI.

Over 70 simple incredibly effective recipes for taking control of Yahoo! User Interface Library like a Pro

• Easily develop feature-rich internet applications to interact with the user using various built-in components of YUI library
• Simple and powerful recipes explaining how to use and implement YUI 2.x components
• Gain a thorough understanding of the YUI tools
• Plenty of example code to help you improve your coding and productivity with the YUI Library
• Hands-on solutions that takes a practical approach to recipes

In Detail

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. Although you can create stylish Internet applications by modifying its default components, even advanced users find it challenging to create impressive feature-rich Internet applications using YUI.

This book will help you learn how to use YUI 2.x to build richer, more interactive web applications that impress clients and wow your friends. It has recipes explaining over twenty-five YUI components, showing how to use them, and how to configure them to meet your needs. Each covered component will have extractable code samples that showcase the common ways that the component is used.

The book starts by explaining the core features of YUI 2.x, the utilities that the rest of the library depends on and that will make your life easier. It then explains how to build UI components and make AJAX requests using the YUI framework. Each recipe will cover the most common ways to use a component, how to configure it, and then explain any other features that may be available. We wrap things up by looking at some of the recent beta components and explain how to use them, and how they may be useful on your web application.

For each of the recipes, there is an introductory example, then more advanced examples, followed by an explanation of how the component works and what YUI is doing. For more experienced developers, most recipes also include additional discussion of the solution, explaining to further customize and enhance the component.

This practical book, packed with easy-to-follow recipes, will help you create modern rich internet applications using the most powerful components of Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)

What you will learn from this book

• Understand how YUI 2.x works and what features are available
• Understand how YUI components interact with the DOM, and why
• Effortlessly search the DOM and listen for end-user events
• Simplify retrieving server-side data using AJAX and DataSource
• Learn how to load your scripts and CSS on demand
• Create sophisticated HTML-based panels, tooltips, and dialogs
• Make interactive inputs with AutoComplete
• Harness the power of drag and drop for your UI
• Build sortable, dynamic tables using DataTable
• Design richer user interfaces using YUI buttons and menus
• Show data hierarchies using the TreeView
• Explore some of the more recent beta components
• Take control of your UI as you master YUI 2.x

Approach

This book contains recipes that showcase the common components of YUI, providing suggested examples of use, and a detailed explanation. Except for the first three chapters, which cover the 3 components of YUI that form the foundation for all other components, this book is not meant to be read cover-to-cover. Each recipe is presented as a separate, standalone entity and reading of other prior recipes is not required. Each chapter tackles a particular component or set of related components, introducing the component and explaining how to use it.

Who this book is written for

If you are a web application developer and have some prior experience with or interest in using YUI 2.x to improve the UI of their web applications, then this book is for you. It assumes the reader has prior knowledge of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and basic understanding of how a website works. This book provides an easy-to-use guide for implementing YUI 2.x components, and does not require an expertise in either JavaScript or YUI.

With the introduction of increasingly complex Web services over the last decade, there has been an explosion of interest in service-oriented architecture (SOA), a structural style whose goal is to achieve a coupling of interacting services - functionalities such as filling out an online application for an account, viewing an online bank statement, or placing an online booking or airline ticket order. These services operate through specific interfaces that control and define their operation. However, due to the evolving nature of enterprises, new services and applications must often be incorporated into these same interfaces. Such incorporation can be costly and complex if the original interface is inflexible or incompatible with the technology utilized by the new applications.

In his new book, data architecture guru James Bean teaches you exactly how to design web service interfaces that are capable of being extended to accommodate ever changing business needs and promote incorporation simplicity. The book first provides an overview of critical SOA principles, thereby offering a basic conceptual summary. The book then provides explicit, tactical, and real-world techniques for ensuring compliance with these principles. Using a focused, tutorial-based approach the book provides working syntactical examples - described by Web services standards such as XML, XML Schemas, WSDL and SOAP - that can be used to directly implement interface design procedures, thus allowing you immediately generate value from your efforts. In summary, SOA and Web Services Interface Design provides the basic theory, but also design techniques and very specific implementable encoded interface examples that can be immediately employed in your work, making it an invaluable practical guide to any practitioner in today's exploding Web-based service market.

• Provides chapters on topics of introductory WSDL syntax and XML Schema syntax, taking take the reader through fundamental concepts and into deeper techniques and allowing them to quickly climb the learning curve.




• Provides working syntactical examples - described by Web services standards such as XML, XML Schemas, WSDL and SOAP - that can be used to directly implement interface design procedures.




• Real-world examples generated using the Altova XML Spy tooling reinforce applicability, allowing you to immediately generate value from their efforts.




• A companion website with all artwork and code examples accompanies the book.
  

The interface is the heart and soul of a video game: it is the integral piece that allows a player to interact with the game. In order to create a great interface, you must carefully plan every detail. "Game Interface Design" helps you outline each step and define the goals for your interface. It covers the interface from the first image that appears onscreen to the information displayed during game-play. You'll cover basic design and art principles, explore the world of interface buttons as you learn how to create your own functioning button, and find out how to substitute images and icons for onscreen text. You'll also learn how to incorporate animation and use Flash to create an amazing, interactive interface. Along the way, you'll get a glimpse into the video game industry, including developer and publisher relationships, schedules, budget constraints, and politics of the industry.

Modern web application user interface design requires rapid development and proven results. jQuery UI, a trusted plugin for the jQuery JavaScript library, gives you a trusted platform on which to build rich and engaging interfaces with maximum compatibility, stability, and a minimum of time and effort.

jQuery UI has a series of ready-made, great-looking user interface widgets and a comprehensive set of core interaction helpers designed to be implemented in a consistent and developer-friendly way. With all this, the amount of code that you need to write personally to take a project from conception to completion is drastically reduced This book has been written to maximize your experience with the library by breaking down each component and walking you through examples that progressively build upon your knowledge, taking you from beginner to advanced usage in a series of easy to follow steps.

In this book, you'll learn how each component can be initialized in a basic default implementation and then see how easy it is to customize its appearance and configure its behaviour to tailor it to the requirements of your application. You'll look at the properties and methods exposed by each component's API and see how these can be used to bring out the best in each component.

Events play a key role in any modern web applications if it is to meet the expected minimum requirements of interactivity and responsiveness, and each chapter will show you the custom events fired by each component and how these events can be intercepted and acted upon.

Approach

An example-based approach leads you step-by-step through the implementation and customization of each library component and its associated resources in turn. To emphasize the way that jQuery UI takes the difficulty out of user interface design and implementation, each chapter ends with a `fun with' section that puts together what you've learned throughout the chapter to make a usable and fun page. In these sections you'll often get to experiment with the latest associated technologies like AJAX and JSON.

Build highly interactive web applications with ready-to-use widgets from the jQuery User Interface library

• Organize your interfaces with reusable widgets: accordions, date pickers, dialogs, sliders, tabs, and more
• Enhance the interactivity of your pages by making elements drag-and-droppable, sortable, selectable, and resizable
• Packed with examples and clear explanations of how to easily design elegant and powerful front-end interfaces for your web applications
• Revised and targeted at jQuery UI 1.7

In Detail Modern web application user interface design requires rapid development and proven results. jQuery UI, a trusted suite of official plug-ins for the jQuery JavaScript library, gives you a solid platform on which to build rich and engaging interfaces with maximum compatibility and stability, and minimum time and effort.

jQuery UI has a series of ready-made, great-looking user interface widgets and a comprehensive set of core interaction helpers designed to be implemented in a consistent and developer-friendly way. With all this, the amount of code that you need to write personally to take a project from conception to completion is drastically reduced.

Specially revised for version 1.7 of jQuery UI, this book has been written to maximize your experience with the library by breaking down each component and walking you through examples that progressively build upon your knowledge, taking you from beginner to advanced usage in a series of easy-to-follow steps.

In this book, you'll learn how each component can be initialized in a basic default implementation and then see how easy it is to customize its appearance and configure its behavior to tailor it to the requirements of your application. You'll look at the configuration options and the methods exposed by each component's API to see how these can be used to bring out the best of the library.

Events play a key role in any modern web application if it is to meet the expected minimum requirements of interactivity and responsiveness, and each chapter will show you the custom events fired by the component covered and how these events can be intercepted and acted upon.

What you will learn from this book?

• How the brand-new CSS framework styles each of the library components
• Organizing different sections of related content as tabs and accordions to save space on your page while maximizing its content
• Displaying messages, images, and interactive content like forms using the dialog widget
• Using sliders for volume and color control of your applications by dynamically scrolling left and right, displaying different ranges
• Allowing your site visitors to select dates from the calendar using the date picker widget
• Adding an attractive and effective deterministic progress bar to give visitors essential feedback on how much longer a process has left to complete
• Providing a drag-and-drop mechanism to let users directly rearrange elements around the page
• Making a range of elements of a group selectable and taking collective actions on them
• Creating a page with content boxes that can be sorted into various positions to suit the visitor's personal preference
• Adding flair to your actions with animation effects

Approach

An example-based approach leads you step-by-step through the implementation and customization of each library component and its associated resources in turn. To emphasize the way that jQuery UI takes the difficulty out of user interface design and implementation, each chapter ends with a 'fun with' section that puts together what you've learned throughout the chapter to make a usable and fun page. In these sections you'll often get to experiment with the latest associated technologies like AJAX and JSON.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for front-end designers and developers who need to quickly learn how to use the jQuery UI User Interface Library. To get the most out of this book you should have a good working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and will need to be comfortable using jQuery, the underlying foundation of jQuery UI.