Today, websites are more customizable than ever, allowing users to alter their space and personalize it to their liking. Personalized home or dashboard pages, such as iGoogle, MyYahoo!, and MyAOL, have become increasingly common, and similar functionality is even being incorporated into most web applications. The jQuery library has made it simple to write complex JavaScript interactions such as these, and with the introduction of the jQuery UI, this functionality is even easier, as the library provides common user interaction types in easy-to-access jQuery plug-ins.
This article explains how to use Ajax and the jQuery UI to create highly customizable UIs with a variety of custom functionality. You learn how to customize various aspects of a web page as well as how to save preferences using Ajax. And, you’ll use techniques such as drag and drop to order list items and organize page elements and UI widgets to switch themes and color schemes—all without leaving a single web page.
Read the original article at IBM Developerworks
