5 Useful JQuery Plugins

JQuery Plugins

JavaScript has been considered a 'not-so-serious' language by the web developers fraternity for much of its lifetime however recent interest in sophisticated rich web applications resulted in JavaScript's revival into the mainstream. This has been backed by the developments of various powerful JavaScript libraries among which JQuery stands out taking the web development community by storm. To its credentials include being distributed with Nokia's Web Run time Component on their phones and Microsoft's Visual Studio tools. Moreover JQuery is supported by a growing community of coders developing a heap of build-for-purpose JQuery plugins. But just as the extensive market for third-party add-on products for Apple's iPod would not exist if the iPod itself did not, the core JQuery library is the heart of it all. Following are top 5 useful JQuery Plugins that are small in size but very effective.
JQuery File Upload – JQuery UI version - https://github.com/blueimp/JQuery-File-Upload

File Upload widget with multiple file selection, drag&drop support, progress bar, validation and preview images, audio and video for JQuery. Supports cross-domain, chunked and resumable file uploads. This has made it very easy to add a dynamic multiple file uploader with a lot of options such as custom css that can be used to give the File upload widget a touch of your website theme.

JQuery Zoom - http://www.jacklmoore.com/zoom/

A plugin to enlarge images on click or mouse-over. It adds a smooth zoom feature to any image on the page almost effortlessly. The plugin takes just 1 line of code to setup the zoom feature and offers a few options to set the effect on click or mouse-over event. You can also remove the zoom from an image!

Colorbox – a JQuery lightbox - http://www.jacklmoore.com/colorbox/

A lightweight[10kb] customizable lightbox plugin for JQuery that supports photos, grouping, slideshow, ajax, inline and iframed content. Offering custom CSS feature and ability to be extended with callbacks and event-hooks, it preloads upcoming images in a photo group. Well vetted and currently in use in over 600,000 websites.

AdjustVideo - http://videoplugin.soluch.at/

This is a personal favorite because it reminds me of the pain I once had working at a project long time back where the video player needed to enlarge without losing the aspect ratio. This plugin is extremely lightweight[3.5KB] yet very effective and easy to setup. A must have if your website has videos gallery.

JQuery-Mousewheel - https://github.com/brandonaaron/JQuery-mousewheel

Again a personal favorite, this lightweight[4KB] plugin adds cross-browser mouse wheel support. You can easily bind/unbind the mouse wheel to any DOM object just the way you bind/unbind a mouse click. Using the parameters of the callback function, this plugin makes it possible to make the scrolling animations possible.

In the end, I would like to share a very useful presentation about the Performance Tips and Tricks for JQuery developers.

JQuery Proven Performance Tips & Tricks from Addy Osmani

AUTHOR:

Kevin works as the head of web development at http://contentxpert.net which is primarily a content/web development company, with a wide range of services.