I’ve been interested in the internal structure of jQuery for as long as I can remember, but it can be overwhelming at the best of times, so I’ve recently made-good on my plan to build an interactive breakdown of the physical code.

Essentially, it provides a rather handy birds-eye view of the jQuery library, making it easy to dig into and understand the coding behind the seemingly-simple syntax.

Points of note:

• It breaks the physical JavaScript into visual blocks that you can easiliy navigate.
• Each block opens to reveal its internal code
• Clickable hyperlinks allow you to follow program flow

It now also has a few nice features such as:

• Live links to the online documentation
• Color themes
• Optional icons

Check it out here: http://www.keyframesandcode.com/resources/javascript/deconstructed/

But sometimes, if I’m *cough* hacking *cough cough* someone else’s page, I need the added power of jQuery! But what if the page doesn’t have it?

Simple – load jQuery from a remote source manually through a javascript: call.

Save Favelet

Just drag the link below to your Links toolbar, then click it on any page to jQuery-enable it.

Add jQuery to page

Test it out!

Save the Favelet and click on it (or just click the link above), then: animate page.

Simple!

Its primary use is for forms, but it can also be used for tables, lists, or any element you specify. It can also be used to toggle elements on and off, for example, table rows.

Examples uses:

• Form-filling can be made clearer by highlighting the element around a control as you tab into it
• Table rows can be made more visible as you pass the mouse over them, or click them
• Elements can be toggled as you click them

Code example

Because of the defaults, basic usage can be as simple as:

$('form').highlight();

The method signature for Highlight is:

$(selector).highlight(parentSelector, highlightClass, startEvent, endEvent);

Demo

View the Highlight demo which has examples for forms, tables, and lists.

Download

• jquery.highlight.js
• jquery.highlight.pack.js

This plugin supports full PHP naming and deep data structures, as well as checkbox arrays, other non-standard UI controls, and even standard HTML elements such as labels or divs.

The plugin can be used as part of your AJAX toolkit, or for separating server-side code from HTML by populating a form after the page has loaded eg:

$('form').populate({text:'text', radio:1})

and not inline as the page is processed, such as:

<input type="text" name="text" id="text" value="<?php echo $text; ?>" />
<input type="radio" name="radio" id="radio-1" checked="<?php echo $val == 1; ?>" />
<input type="radio" name="radio" id="radio-2" checked="<?php echo $val == 2; ?>" />

You can also populate non-form controls such as <div>s, by specifiying the id and an identifying attribute (defaults to id):

$('div').populate({'text-1':'text', 'text-2':'More text'})

This can be useful when you want to show the results of a database call, but don’t want the text to be editable.

Instructions and demos

View the jQuery Populate demo for a view a full set of instructions and a working demo, with examples of populating:

• a simple form, using string variable types for textfields, radiobuttons, dropdowns and checkboxes
• a complex form, using array variable types for checkbox arrays and multi-list boxes
• a hierarchical form, using hierarchical JSON data

Update 29th November 2009

Thanks to everyone who spotted bugs and contributed their comments. The following features are added / bugs are now squished:

• Now populates standard HTML elements within forms
• Is now case-sensitive for element value comparisons (keith, 5030SDEC, Mark Croxton)
• Now skips function references and undefined elements (Henning, Found-a-Bug)
• Fixed debug trace for missing elements (Found-a-Bug)

Download

JavaScript

• Populate (no compression) 4.6k
• Populate (packer compression) 1.6k

PHP

• PHP jQuery helper functions
• PHP JSON class

Demo files

• Populate standalone demos

I do so much database stuff these days that seems to be virtually every site I’m starting from scratch, or hacking an old site’s template to work on a new site. Then once the CSS has been hammered out, comes the laborious task of form validation – tidying up all the names and ids, dusting off my RegExp-foo to validate emails, usernames, etc, etc.

It’s very time-consuming and just feels like I’m missing a trick!

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a magic bullet to convert a list of text into fully validated, accessible HTML form controls!?

Form Builder

Enter “Form Builder” – an online JavaScript application that will build accessible, cross-platform and validated form HTML in literally 10 seconds flat. Just type or paste in your form labels, edit some options (if you want to) and view the Live Preview and HTML.

Form builder does pretty much everything you might want…

So I’ve done some hard research and have employed best-practices for:

• HTML Code
• Styling
• Accessibility
• Validation

For example, what about:

• Ease of use: copy all your labels to one text field and a whole set of controls built on linebreaks, tabs, commas
• Live preview: not happy with the code? Edit the HTML and watch the Live Preview update
• Intelligent attribute naming: for example, a form label is “Blood pressure (mmHg)”, your names and ids are truncated at the first illegal character and re-named “blood_pressure” / “blood-pressure”
• Automatic values: values are automatically built from the label names, or you can just paste in another list of values
• PHP (or other) naming styles: specify a data sub-group, or use your own square bracket naming [] to group data into discrete chunks
• Accessible HTML: all controls are married with labels, and where appropriate wrapped within <fieldset> tags
• Validation: Optionally include basic validation attributes on elements using jQuery’s Validation plugin.

Jump in and play here, then go do something more useful with all that spare time!

Installation is as easy as copy and pasting two scripts into each web page you want tracked. What could be easier than that!? Well, how about one script?

Here’s the code needed to run the tracking functions automatically:

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/google-analytics.js"></script>

Here’s the code to load the tracking functions without running them (works in ALL browsers, not just IE!) so you can call the code yourself later (for example, tracking an AJAX call):

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/google-analytics.js" defer="defer"></script>

Of course, there’s a few of these out there already, but here’s the specifics on my take:

• easy: a single external script that loads the Google code dynamically
• intelligent: calls tracking function only when remote script has fully downloaded
• versatile: use of defer attribute to run automatically (or not)
• customizable: provides a wrapper function to execute your own custom code
• tidy: intermediate setup variables are created privately via a function closure

Just be sure to add your tracking id to the initialization function!

Download google-analytics.js