Setting up a development environment
We'll need a location to unpack the jQuery UI library in order to easily access the different parts of it within our own files. We should first create a project folder, into which all of our example files as well as all of the library, and other associated resources can be saved.
Create a new folder in your C: drive, or your home directory, and call it jqueryui. This will be the root folder of our project and will be the location where we store all of the example files that we'll make over the course of the book.
Note
The structure of the accompanying code download for this book will mirror the local environment we are creating.
To unpack the library, you can use Windows Explorer (if working on a PC), or a compression program such as 7-zip. When extracting the library, choose the jqueryui folder that we just created. If you are a Mac user, you may need to copy the contents of the jqueryui-1.10.3.custom folder into the new jqueryui folder we have just created. (We will go through the structure of the jqueryui folder later in this chapter.)
Note
7-zip is an open source archive application similar to WinZip or WinRAR; I personally find it better and easier to use. You can download it for free from at http://www.7-zip.org.
The code examples that we'll be looking at use other resources, mostly images, but occasionally some PHP files too. The accompanying code download available on the Packt Publishing website contains all of the images that we'll be using. You should download this if you can, from http://www.packtpub.com/support/book/user-interface-library-for-jquery. You'll need to create a new folder within the jqueryui project folder and call it img, then unpack all of the images within the image folder in the archive to this new folder.
Once you have unpacked the jqueryui folder and added any additional folders that are required, you will see something similar to the following screenshot—here I've used Chapter 5 as an example, which requires an additional img folder to be created:
The code download also contains all the examples as well as the library itself. These files are provided in the hope that they will be used for reference purposes only. I'd recommend that you follow the examples in the book as you go along, manually creating each file as it is shown, instead of just referring to the files in the code download. The best way to learn code, is to code.
This is all that we need to do, no additional platforms or applications need to be installed and nothing needs to be configured or set up. As long as you have a browser and some kind of code or text editor, everything is in place to begin developing with the library.
There are plenty of editors available, any of which will be fine for use with jQuery UI, if you don't already have a preferred editor—for Windows users, you can try Notepad++ (freely available from http://www.notepad-plus-plus.org), or Sublime Text 2 (shareware, which can be downloaded from http://www.sublimetext.com/2). I would avoid using memory-hungry IDEs, as they tend to facilitate too much of the work and therefore impact on the learning curve when using jQuery UI.
Note
For those of you who like to develop using a local web server, then you may use something like WAMP (for PC) or MAMP (for Mac), if you do not already have something set up as a part of your normal daily workflow. Linux users should find a suitable web server that is available from within their distro.
