Summary

jQuery UI removes the difficulty of building engaging and effective user interfaces. It provides a range of components that can be used quickly and easily out of the box with little configuration. Each component exposes a comprehensive set of properties and methods for integration with your pages or applications that can be leveraged if a more complex configuration is required.

Each component is designed to be efficient, lightweight, and semantically correct, all while making use of the latest object-oriented features of JavaScript, and using a concise, well-tested framework. When combined with jQuery, it provides an awesome addition to any web developer's toolkit.

So far, we've seen how the library can be obtained, how your system can be set up to utilize it, and how the library is structured. We've also looked at how we can add or customize a theme for different widgets, how the API simply and consistently exposes the library's functionality, and the different categories of component. We've covered some important topics during the course of this chapter, but now we can get on with using the components of jQuery UI and get down to some proper coding, beginning with a look at the CSS framework.