While most plugins, such as Cycle and Cookie, focus on a single task, jQuery UI tackles a wide variety of challenges. In fact, while the jQuery UI code may often be packaged as a single file, it is actually a comprehensive suite of related plugins.

The jQuery UI team has created a number of core interaction components and full-fledged widgets to help make the web experience more like that of a desktop application. Interaction components include methods for dragging, dropping, sorting, selecting, and resizing items. The current stable of widgets includes buttons, accordions, datepickers, dialogs, and so on. Additionally, jQuery UI provides an extensive set of advanced effects to supplement the core jQuery animations.

The full UI library is too extensive to be adequately covered within this chapter; indeed, there are entire books devoted to the subject. Fortunately, a major focus of the project is consistency among its features, so exploring a couple of pieces in...