Here at Creative Jar we are constantly on the look out for tools in which we can use to en-rich the user experience for our customers. This involves finding new ways in which to perform tasks on a website such as filling out a form, re-ordering items on the website and at the same time making them easier for the customer to use.

I have recently been looking a lot into jQuery -- a code library that builds upon the Javascript language and is designed to make things easier; both for the developer and the end-user.

"jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript." -- jQuery official site.

jQuery enables to create a lot of the UI (User Interface) which we want to create for our customers; we can make items drag and droppable, animate objects to draw attention such as success or error messages. I find that by integrating jQuery into our websites, we can really lift the website off the page and bring it to life.

What I love most about jQuery is the ease of use, browser compatibility and the size of the code. We get a tool that; is easy to impliment on a webpage; works in IE6+, Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, Chrome and Safari 3+ and is roughly 19KB in size meaning that it does not affect the page loading times.

To make things even more exciting, jQuery released a new verson of their jQuery UI on March 6th.

"jQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications." -- jQuery UI official site.

This new UI offers semantically clean code for their 'widgets' that can be styled easily using a CSS Framework -- making the tools we use a lot more easier to style and fit in more with the design created by the Creative team. That way everyone is happy -- as developers we have cool tools we can implement into web pages and as designers we are happy with the look and style of these tools. I will definitely be looking to use this a lot more in our projects.

You can view demos of what you can achieve with jQuery and jQuery UI here.