jQuery is one really awesome JavaScript library, and there is definitely no argument that it makes life easier. But its robustness can be its downfall sometimes. You can do almost anything with it, but with some things it is hard to figure out just how to do it. Today I will take you through some jQuery selectors that you may have not known about concerning forms.

Those of us who are used to GUI frameworks are used to the many components often built in. Everything from textboxes to progress bars are at our disposal. But when you move to the web there are no 'built in' version of many of these building blocks. The treeview has many incarnations on the web, and there is good reason. It is a versatile component, usable in any type of collection management. There are many ways to get a treeview going on the web, but today we will be taking jQuery and making a quick and dirty treeview - one that can be built and used in a matter of minutes.

Can you name all the valid HTML tags? Probably not, because there are a number of tags that are rarely ever used (come on, when was the last time you used the <dfn> tag). But there is one tag that you might not know about (because it is not terribly common), but is quite useful - the <label> tag.

Lately I've been working with jQuery plugins and I decided to create a tutorial demonstrating how to use the jQuery plugin system to build a simple star ratings control.

Tooltips are not the most exciting thing about the web. I mean you hover your mouse over a link or image for a couple of seconds and you get some text describing it. With all the really cool web apps out there, tooltips have lost their touch on the web. But, with a little help from jQuery, we can take these boring tips and replace them with our own fancy ones. Since jQuery is quite an amazing library, we can do this in a snap.

Sometimes, I sit around scratching my head trying to think of good tutorials to write. This time I am taking a cue from The Tallest. Recently, he wrote the tutorial, Silverlight 2 Transmitting Data Using JSON, which was a direct copy of an earlier post I wrote for Flex - well I decided to do the same thing except use Javascript with jQuery to handle the interaction. Now, I think as far as technologies go I believe it may be slightly easier to do this in Silverlight or Flex. My reasoning behind this is simply because the interface is quicker to layout. Other than that I think that it is just a easy to use jQuery to do this kind of interaction.

Today we are going to take a look at a handy way to pass in information to a silverlight application when a web page loads - the initParams. initParams are very similar to flash vars (except, of course, flash vars are for flex and flash apps). I find them very useful for passing in information like callbacks and paths - in fact in the silverlight tutorial the other day I used them to pass in the url for the callback php page.

Last time we talked Cake, we went over the very basics of website building in CakePHP. All we did was grab some data, pass it to the view and crudely display it on the page. Today, we will be building on our code from the last tutorial. We will be using some cool features of Cake to streamline and style our code.

We've written lots of tutorials about sliding panels, and in all the previous tutorials we saw how to implement sliding panels from scratch or how to implement them using our generic animation library. In this tutorial, we're going to build them using the very popular Javascript library, JQuery.

One of the many ways of getting information in Flash and/or Flex is using FlashVars which can be passed in through the embedding mechanism. This method is used for many different things. It can be used to pass in a video to play or a simple parameter you don't want to define at compile time. You can see examples of this all over the web in places like Google Finance and YouTube.