Tag Archives: jQuery

Web development #7: Dynamic page updates with AJAX

So in theory you should now have all the tools to create the most awesome websites. However, I don’t think any tutorial on web development is complete without doing some AJAX. No idea what I’m talking about? Read my previous posts.

  1. Web development #1: Internet and the World Wide Web
  2. Web development #2: Our first website using HTML
  3. Web development #3: Styling our page with CSS 3
  4. Web development #4: PHP in the back
  5. Web development #5: User input with HTML Forms
  6. Web development #6: Getting interactive with JavaScript
  7. Web development #7: Dynamic page updates with AJAX
  8. Web development #8: Where to go from here

So what is AJAX all about? It’s an abbreviation for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It enables us to send a request to the server and receive a result without having to refresh our entire page. Now that’s pretty awesome! What’s also pretty awesome is that we don’t need to use XML. As Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, already said “XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it’s a disaster to parse even for computers. There’s just no reason for that horrible crap to exist.” So what we’ll be using is a form of AJAX called AJAJ, where the last J stands for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). To make it a bit more confusing, we’ll just call it AJAX anyway. Oh yeah, and it doesn’t have to be asynchronous either…

JavaScript objects and JSON

First of all we need to know what JavaScript Objects are and what they look like. After that JSON will come naturally. So JavaScript has objects and much like objects in other languages JavaScript objects are just wrappers around certain functionality. The difficulty in JavaScript, of course, lies in that anything can be anything and then can become anything else… Let’s just look at an example.

// Creates an empty object.
var obj = {};
// Gives the object a firstName property.
obj.firstName = 'Sander';
// Gives the object a lastName property.
obj.lastName = 'Rossel';
// Gives the object a getFullName function.
obj.getFullName = function () {
    return this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName;
};

// Alternative for the above.
var person = {
    firstName: 'Sander',
    lastName: 'Rossel',
    getFullName: function () {
        return this.firstName + ' ' + this.lastName;
    }
};

Now this wouldn’t be JavaScript if we didn’t have even more methods to create objects (JavaScript also knows constructors). We’re not interested in those though. What we’re interested in is the second method I’m using. Notice that, to create an object, we use curly braces. We can then basically add anything to that object by simply defining keys (property or function names) and values (default values for properties or implementations for functions) seperated by colons. Each key and value is seperated by a comma. And of course objects can contain other objects too.

var outerObj = {
    innerObj: {
        someValue: null
    },
    anotherInnerObj: {
        innerInnerObj: {}
    },
    message: 'Phew, what syntax!'
};

You can work with objects as ways of namespaces so you can keep the ‘global namespace’ clean and minimize the chance for name conflicts with other libraries. Objects are also often used to create some sort of options that are given to a function. A function then simply checks if some property or method on the option object exists, what its value is, and acts accordingly. We’ll see this usage a little later when working with AJAX.

So then, what is JSON? It’s simply some text using almost the exact notation we just saw. So let’s look at some examples.

{
    "firstName": "Sander",
    "lastName": "Rossel"
}

{
    "innerObj": {
        "someValue": null
    },
    "anotherInnerObj": {
        "innerInnerObj": {}
    },
    "message": "Phew, what syntax!"
}

That’s looking pretty familiar now, doesn’t it? And, if you compare it to XML, it’s a lot more compact, saving you precious bits and bytes when you’re sending your data over the internet!

Making an AJAX request

So let’s look at an AJAX example. I’ll start very simple making a synchronous request that returns just plain text (so no XML or JSON) when the page loads. You’ll know that the request doesn’t refresh the page because if it would the page would keep refreshing (as it makes the request upon loading). Alternatively, you can track all requests your browser makes using your browsers developer tools (press F12 in IE, FireFox or Chrome and navigate to the Network tab). I’m using jQuery to get the page load event and to show the result of our AJAX request. So here’s the HTML (in a file called Ajax.html):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="Ajax.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p id="result"></p>
    </body>
</html>

Here’s our JavaScript (Ajax.js):

$(function () {
    var ajax = new XMLHttpRequest();
    ajax.open('GET', 'Ajax.php', false);
    ajax.send();
 
    $('#result').text(ajax.responseText);
});

And finally our PHP (Ajax.php):

<?php
    echo 'Result of AJAX request!';
?>

So all of these files go into the htdocs folder of your XAMPP installation and you’ll have to access your page by browsing to localhost/Ajax.html (notice I named all files ‘Ajax’). So what’s really interesting here is that in my JavaScript I’m using an XMLHttpRequest object. So we call the open method and pass in a string specifying the HTTP method, GET or POST. Next we’re telling it what URL to navigate to and last we’re specifying whether the request should be asynchronous (we’re calling it synchronous). Then we send the request to the server. So, because we’re calling it synchronous the browser blocks until we get response from the server. That means that on our next line of code we simply have our result, ajax.responseText. Now you’ll never do this, in fact, our browser even gives off a warning saying that this method is deprecated because it negatively affects the user experience. In our case we won’t notice the blocking, but if we’re downloading larger chunks of data our page will freeze up completely!

So let’s make that call asynchronous so the user can go about doing his business while our page gets our data for us. This isn’t actually to hard. We simply change our JavaScript to the following:

$(function () {
    var ajax = new XMLHttpRequest();
    ajax.onreadystatechange = function () {
        if (ajax.readyState == 4) {
            $('#result').text(ajax.responseText);
        };
    };
    ajax.open('GET', 'Ajax.php', true);
    ajax.send();
});

So I’m specifying an onreadystatechange function which gets called when the state of our ajax object changes. State 4 means it’s done and we can get the result.

Now there are quite some options we can set and check, but I’ll not get into that. You can check them on the XMLHttpRequest documentation page and play around with them yourself. Instead, we’re going to use jQuery to make AJAX requests.

Using jQuery for AJAX requests

You might be thinking if there’s anything jQuery cannot do? There’s actually plenty of stuff you don’t want to do using jQuery, but AJAX isn’t one of them. jQuery makes AJAX pretty easy actually. We were already using jQuery, so we can simply edit our JavaScript.

$(function () {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url: 'Ajax.php',
        complete: function (jqXHR) {
            $('#result').text(jqXHR.responseText);
        }
    });
});

So remember I was telling you about using an object to specify options? This is one such an example. We’re passing in an object and specify the type, the url and a function that will be called when the requests completes (jqXHR stand for jQuery XMLHttpRequest, but you can name it anything). We could’ve passed in much more, but we didn’t. So this does the same as the code we had earlier.

The jQuery.ajax function can actually do a whole lot of stuff! Next we’re going to pass in some parameters and echo them on our page.

$(function () {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url: 'Ajax.php',
        data: {
            artist: 'Led Zeppelin',
            song: 'Immigrant Song'
        },
        complete: function (jqXHR) {
            $('#result').text(jqXHR.responseText);
        }
    });
});

And now we need to alter our PHP too.

<?php
    if (isset($_REQUEST['artist']) &&
        isset($_REQUEST['song']))
    {
        $artist = $_REQUEST['artist'];
        $song = $_REQUEST['song'];
        echo "The song '$song' by $artist rocks!";
    }
?>

So that was pretty easy, right? We just passed in a JavaScript object with some properties and they were converted to parameters in our PHP automatically! So how does this work the other way around? This is where JSON comes into play! JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, so it should be pretty easy for JavaScript to create actual objects that we can use. So let’s start by modifying our PHP so that it returns JSON.

<?php
    class song
    {
        public $artist = NULL;
        public $name = NULL;
    }
 
    if (isset($_REQUEST['artist']) &&
        isset($_REQUEST['song']))
    {
        $song = new song();
        $song->artist = $_REQUEST['artist'];
        $song->name = $_REQUEST['song'];
 
        header('Content-Type: application/json');
        echo json_encode($song);
    }
?>

First of all, I’m using an object to store our data. We’ve seen this before. I’m setting our response header so that it tells our browser it’s json. Then I’m using the json_encode function to convert our object into JSON. If you now check out the result in your browser you’ll notice that we’ve received some actual JSON!

But what we really want is to use this JSON in our JavaScript as if it were just an object. Actually this is pretty easy! We can get the object from the XMLHttpRequest.

complete: function (jqXHR) {
    var song = jqXHR.responseJSON;
    $('#result').text("The song '" + song.name + "' by " + song.artist + " rocks!");
}

And that’s it. Alternatively, we can use the ‘success’ option, a function that passes us the returned data, the status of the request and the XMLHttpRequest.

$(function () {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url: 'Ajax.php',
        data: {
            artist: 'Led Zeppelin',
            song: 'Immigrant Song'
        },
        success: function (song, status, jqXHR) {
            $('#result').text("The song '" + song.name + "' by " + song.artist + " rocks!");
        }
    });
});

And likewise there is an ‘error’ option.

$(function () {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'GET',
        url: 'Ajaj.php',
        data: {
            artist: 'Led Zeppelin',
            song: 'Immigrant Song'
        },
        success: function (song, status, jqXHR) {
            $('#result').text("The song '" + song.name + "' by " + song.artist + " rocks!");
        },
        error: function (jqXHR, status, errorThrown) {
            $('#result').text('An error occurred: ' + jqXHR.status + ' ' + errorThrown);
        }
    });
});

Notice that I’m calling ‘Ajaj.php’, a page that doesn’t exist. Naturally we’ll get 404, Not found. When using the ‘complete’ option we used earlier you’d have to check for success yourself, our current implementation would actually break our page if we called ‘ajaj.php’.

So there’s actually quite a bit to think about when using AJAX. Did the server return a result, what kind of result did it return, was the request successful, etc. We can use the XMLHttpRequest object for this. Check ‘status’ to see if our request was successful (status 200 means success) and then ‘responseType’ and any of ‘response’, ‘responseText’, ‘responseJSON’ or ‘responseXML’ for the result.

Posting data

So in the previous examples we’ve taken a look at the GET method. In the next example I’m going to take our movies page we created in my previous blog posts, Web development #4: PHP in the back and Web development #5: User input with HTML Forms. So first of all we’ll have to edit the PHP file. We want the form to go, because that refreshes the page. We also want to add jQuery and a custom JavaScript file to our header. Last, we need to give some ids to some elements because now we need to update the page ourselves once we add a new movie (after all, the page isn’t refreshing). So without further delay, here’s the modified PHP.

<?php
    if (isset($_POST['movieName']))
    {
        $movieName = $_POST['movieName'];
        if ($movieName)
        {
            file_put_contents('movies.txt', htmlspecialchars($movieName) . "rn", FILE_APPEND);
        }
 
        exit();
    }
?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <?php
        function fileAsUnorderedList($fileName, $notFoundMessage)
        {
            if (file_exists($fileName))
            {
                echo '<ul id="movies">';
                $lines = file($fileName);
                foreach ($lines as $line)
                {
                    echo '<li>' . htmlspecialchars($line) . '</li>';
                }
                echo '</ul>';
            }
            else
            {
                echo $notFoundMessage;
            }
        }
    ?>
    <header>
        <title>My favourite movies!</title>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <meta name="description" content="A list of my favourite movies.">
        <meta name="keywords" content="Favourite,movies">
        <meta name="author" content="Sander Rossel">
        <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="Movies.js"></script>
    </header>
    <body>
        <h1>My favourite movies!</h1>
        <p>
        <?php
            fileAsUnorderedList('movies.txt', 'No favourite movies found!');
        ?>
        </p>
        <h2>Add a movie!</h2>
        <div>
            <label for="movieName">Movie name</label>
            <input type="text" name="movieName" id="movieName" />
            <button id="submit">Submit</button>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

And then we need to add a JavaScript file (I’ve called it Movies.js) to add an event handler to our button click event which takes the value of the input, posts it to the server and on success adds the movie to our list and empties the movie input.

$(function () {
    $('#submit').on('click', function () {
        var movieInput = $('#movieName');
        var movieName = movieInput.val();
        if (movieName) {
            $.ajax({
                type: 'POST',
                url: 'Movies.php',
                data: {
                    movieName: movieName
                },
                success: function (data, status, jqXHR) {
                    $('#movies').append('<li>' + movieName + '</li>');
                    movieInput.val(null);
                },
                error: function (jqXHR, status, errorThrown) {
                    alert("An error occurred while adding movie '" + movieName + "'.");
                }
            });
        };
    });
});

And there you have it. Looks complicated? I guess it is a bit, but once you get the hang of it it’s not so bad. And luckily the documentation is rather good!
Another cool addition to our page would be pagination. Let’s say we are going to add hundreds of movies. Getting those all in once might slow down our page quite a bit. So we can use AJAX to get just ten, or twenty, or fifty at a time. The page could load them on a button click or when we scroll to the end of the page (that is, get the movie titles and add them to our list using jQuery, also make sure you ‘remember’ what page you’re on). This principle is called pagination and can greatly enhance user performance (and for large websites it’s even a must).

So that’s it for AJAX. And actually, that’s it for web development! You’ve now seen everything involved in creating awesome, responsive web pages. Of course there’s still a long way to go as we’ve only scratched the surface of web development. We’ve seen the tools, but are by no means expert in any of them. In my next, and last, blog post I’ll give you some tips on frameworks and libraries that can help you create the pages you want.

Stay tuned!

Web development #6: Getting interactive with JavaScript

We’ve come pretty far by now! We’re almost there actually. After reading this post you should be able to create pretty awesome websites using the full web development stack! So what’s left for us to discover? We have seen we can build dynamic websites on the back end using PHP, but what about being dynamic once the page is loaded? Well that’s where JavaScript comes into play!

  1. Web development #1: Internet and the World Wide Web
  2. Web development #2: Our first website using HTML
  3. Web development #3: Styling our page with CSS 3
  4. Web development #4: PHP in the back
  5. Web development #5: User input with HTML Forms
  6. Web development #6: Getting interactive with JavaScript
  7. Web development #7: Dynamic page updates with AJAX
  8. Web development #8: Where to go from here

The websites we’ve build were all pretty amazing. We’ve started simple using just HTML, added some CSS, then we added some dynamic content and we could even upload our own content. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty amazing. However, I still feel like our pages are missing a little… schwung! How about highlighting buttons, sliding content in and out of our page? Just some fancy visuals that will make our website stand out. JavaScript comes to the rescue.
As an added bonus we can make calls to our back end without refreshing the entire page using AJAX. More on that later, let’s look at some fundamentals first.

JavaScript fundamentals

JavaScript has been around since 1995. It’s easy to learn, but hard to master. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the syntax because it looks (and behaves) a lot like PHP, including truthy and falsey). I’m just going to write code. Try to keep up. I’m still writing in Notepad++ by the way. We also won’t be needing XAMPP to run basic JavaScript in this post (we’ll be needing it later for AJAX though).

One thing you should know about JavaScript is that, like CSS, it can be embedded into your HTML. But we don’t want that. In my post about CSS we learned to keep HTML and CSS seperated, which makes it easier for you to remodel your page by simply replacing some CSS files. We’ll use the same approach for JavaScript.

So let’s take a look at our first example. Yes, it’s going to be Hello world! Not the most exciting example, but you’ll see JavaScript in action. So we start out by creating a very simple HTML file. Call it whatever you like.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>My first JavaScript!</title>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <button onclick="sayHello();">Press me!</button>
        <p id="output"></p>
    </body>
</html>

And now in the same folder create a file called MyJS.js. Inside it put the following code:

function sayHello () {
    var output = document.getElementById('output');
    output.innerHTML = 'Hello JavaScript!';
}

So let’s look at both the HTML and JavaScript. First in the header of the HTML you’ll notice I’ve added a script element. In this element I define the type and src attributes. Pretty straightforward I think. Your HTML now simply loads the specified JavaScript. In an actual server-client environment this means that the JavaScript files are sent to the client together with the HTML page.
Other than that we see a button element with an onclick event. Now whenever the user presses a button an event fires. An event is simply a notification you can subscribe to. In this case we subscribe by specifying onclick and telling it we want the function sayHello to be executed.

Now this function, sayHello, is defined in our MyJS.js file. It does the following. We declare a variable called ‘output’ using the var keyword. We assign it the result of a function called getElementById that takes a string as input parameter and is defined on something called document. Now your document is a variable that your browser gives to you and it represents your HTML content. So we’re almost literally saying “document, give me the element with id ‘output'” and guess what it returns? Yes, our p element with id ‘output’! Now that we have our paragraph we can alter it any way we see fit. In this case I’m simply going to give it the text “Hello JavaScript!”.
There’s more functions like getElementById, like getElementsByName() and getElementsByClassName(). Once you have an element you can get its child elements (using children()), its parent element (using parentElement()), its ‘neighbouring’ elements (using previousSibling() and nextSibling()) and much more. What we’re basically doing is traversing and altering the DOM (Document Object Model, or your HTML document).

Now here’s why I like and dislike JavaScript. It took me about fifteen minutes to get this example running… Fifteen!? Yes. Why? Because I spelled ‘innerHTML’ as ‘innerHtml’ and what does JavaScript do? You might say it gives us an error saying innerHtml does not exist. Wrong, what it actually does is create innerHtml on the ‘output’ variable (or more precisely the object it references). It doesn’t do anything with it, it just sits there. But in the meantime innerHTML remains empty, my page doesn’t show “Hello JavaScript!” and I’m not getting an error of any kind.
So with JavaScript you can actually alter already existing objects! How cool is that? Pretty cool, but it can lead to very subtle and hard to troubleshoot bugs, so be careful. That is also why you should always use the var keyword when creating variables. Failing to do so will work fine, but will actually create a property on your this object (the object, or context, you’re currently operating in).

And that’s actually all I’m going to tell you about basic JavaScript. The standard library is actually pretty difficult to work with and you’ll often deal with bugs like the one I just described. To top it off different browsers can behave differently using the same JavaScript code. Luckily (and also a bit unlucky) there are literally thousands of libraries and frameworks that do all the hard stuff for us. One of those libraries has become so popular that it has become the de facto standard when working with the DOM, I’m talking about jQuery.

Getting started with jQuery

There are two ways to get jQuery included in our page. One we have already seen. We get the jQuery files from jQuery.com, put them on our server (or during development our local machine) and get them in our page using the HTML script element. There are two versions you can get, the regular or the minimized version. The regular version is great for development as it is easier to debug. The minimized version has all unnecessary characters like spaces, meaningful variable names, white lines etc. removed from the file, making them practically unreadable, but making the file a little smaller in size making it to load a bit faster on our webpage. A lot of libraries have regular and minimized versions.

For this example we’re going to use the second method to get jQuery in our page though, which is through a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. A CDN is just some host providing you with popular files you might need, like jQuery. A possible benefit of using a CDN is that they might have servers across the globe, which means that if someone in America is using our website hosted in Europe they could still get jQuery from a server near them. Another possible benefit is that you don’t have to host the file yourself. So if you can, use a CDN.
Popular CDNs are Microsoft and Google, so let’s go with the Google CDN.
One word of caution though. Whenever your website requests a file from any CDN the host of that CDN may track the users of your page (they’re making a request after all). So while this is probably no problem for your personal website, it may be an issue for corporate environments where privacy and security are of bigger importance.

Let’s have a look at how our header looks with jQuery from a CDN.

<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>My first JavaScript!</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
</head>

So you see, it actually looks the same, but we’re putting a link in the src attribute. Also notice that I put jQuery above MyJS because MyJS is going to need jQuery to run. Now let’s rewrite that sayHello function we had so it uses jQuery.

function sayHello() {
    var output = $('#output');
    output.text('Hello jQuery!');
}

Looks weird? $ is actually a perfectly valid function name in JavaScript and jQuery is utilizing it. $ is also called the jQuery function and alternatively you could’ve used jQuery(‘#output’). Now notice what we pass as a parameter to the jQuery function. It’s a CSS selector! Yes, you can get ANY element (or elements) on the page using CSS selectors. That’s great because we already know CSS. And when we have our output element we set the text (the part between the opening and the closing tags) to ‘Hello jQuery!’.

Now remember that I said we shouldn’t have JavaScript in our HTML? Well, we still have our onclick event in the button tag, so I guess I lied. JavaScript doesn’t really have a simple elegant solution to this problem. But jQuery does (they made it simple)! First of all let’s change our button tag so it doesn’t hard wire that onclick event.

<button id="btn">Press me!</button>

And next let’s take a look at our JavaScript.

$(document).ready(function () {
    $('#btn').on('click', sayHello);
});

function sayHello() {
    var output = jQuery('#output');
    output.text('Hello JavaScript!');
}

As you can see I’ve added a $(document).ready(function) call to our JavaScript page. That might look arcane, but it’s really simple actually. We call the jQuery function and pass it our document. We’re getting something back which obviously has a ready function that takes a function as parameter. This function, also called a callback function, is called when the document is ready (the HTML has loaded and is ready for traversal and manipulation). We then create an anonymous function to be called. It’s really the same as our sayHello function, except that we don’t give it a name. So in this anonymous function we get our button element and then call the on function on the result. With the on function we can hook up events to our elements. In this case we want the click event and we specify a function to be called when the click event fires (the button is clicked).
Here’s an alternative way of writing the above. I’m using a shorthand notation for $(document).ready by simply passing an (anonymous) function directly to the jQuery function.

$(function () {
    $('#btn').on('click', function () {
        $('#output').text('Hello jQuery!');
    });
});

Let that sink in. Study the syntax and compare the two examples. Take a look at how I rewrote the sayHello function to an anonymous function in particular, it may help understanding what’s going on. You may also want to try rewriting this using no anonymous functions.

There’s a whole lot to jQuery that I cannot show you in this blog, but the jQuery documentation is actually pretty good, so be sure to use it!

Now I’m going to show you another trick with which you can create beautiful pages using classes and CSS. First create a CSS file called MyStyle.css and add the following style to it:

.hovering {
    color: white;
    background-color: blue;
}

Now let’s create a single paragraph we want to light up once you hover your mouse over it. Don’t forget to link your stylesheet!

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>My first JavaScript!</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="MyStyle.css">
        <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p id="p">Try hovering over me!<br>
        An extra line<br>
        so it's easier<br>
        to hover...</p>
    </body>
</html>

Nothing special there. Now for our JavaScript:

$(function () {
    $('#p').hover(function () {
        $(this).addClass('hovering');
    }, function () {
        $(this).removeClass('hovering');
    });
});

So we get out p element and then call the hover function which takes two functions as input. One function is called when your mouse enters the paragraph and the other function is called when your mouse leaves the paragraph (moving your icon over an element is called hovering). Now in this function we call the jQuery function and pass it this. The this keyword is a little difficult in JavaScript. This is the context in which you are currently operating, so this can refer to the window object (the ‘general context’), to an object in which you are currently operating, or in this case the HTML element on which the hover event is fired. So when we pass the p element (this) to the jQuery function we get a jQuery object on which we can call jQuery functions, such as text or addClass and removeClass. So we’re dynamically adding classes. But since our CSS applies a certain style to those classes we now get dynamic styling on our page!

jQuery UI

I want to show another quick example of how powerful JavaScript, and jQuery in particular, really is. For this we’re going to need jQuery UI. Another library that’s made by the jQuery people and uses jQuery, but adds functionality specifically for your UI (User Interface). Next to a JavaScript file the jQuery UI library makes use of a CSS file too. We can get both from the Google CDN we’ve used earlier. So here is the HTML. It looks large, but it’s quite simple.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title>My first JavaScript!</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.11.3/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.css" />
        <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.11.3/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript" src="MyJS.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="accordion">
            <h3>Page 1</h3>
            <div>
                <p>Some content...</p>
            </div>
            <h3>Page 2</h3>
            <div>
                <p>More content...</p>
            </div>
            <h3>Page 3</h3>
            <div>
                <p>Lots of content...</p>
            </div>
        </div>
        <br>
        <div id="tabs">
            <ul>
                <li><a href="#page1">Page 1</a></li>
                <li><a href="#page2">Page 2</a></li>
                <li><a href="#page3">Page 3</a></li>
            </ul>
            <div id="page1">
                <p>Some content...</p>
            </div>
            <div id="page2">
                <p>More content...</p>
            </div>
            <div id="page3">
                <p>Lots of content...</p>
            </div>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

And now for some amazingly difficult JavaScript…

$(function () {
    $('#accordion').accordion();
    $('#tabs').tabs();
});

So check out the result with and without those two lines of JavaScript. You’ll be amazed! And that’s the power of JavaScript.

So in this post we’ve become familiar with JavaScript and jQuery. You can build amazing websites using JavaScript. There are literally thousands of JavaScript (and CSS) libraries and frameworks. Some, like jQuery, are pretty all-round, but some are really specific about doing one particular thing. In a later blog post I’ll point out some of the more popular ones.
Try to play around a bit with JavaScript. We’ve only scratched the surface. I haven’t even mentioned prototype, which is vital in fully understanding JavaScript. You can start getting your JavaScript skills up to date with a free ebook from SyncFusion: JavaScript Succinctly. Now as luck would have it there’s also a free jQuery ebook from SyncFusion: jQuery Succinctly. So I recommend creating a free account and downloading these sweet free resources (and no, I’m not affiliated with SyncFusion, I just like the Succinctly series).

JavaScript also adds functionality to get data from or send data to our server without having to refresh our entire page. This technology, called AJAX, is what I will talk about in my next blog post.

Stay tuned!