When you’re using a robust toolkit like jQuery, there’s usually a date picker of some kind.  With jQuery it’s a widget plugin.

Originally Written by Marc Grabanski & Extended by Keith Wood.  The jQuery Calendar v2.7 is a powerful and useful tool to add to your jQuery arsenal.

You can find it online here:

http://marcgrabanski.com/code/jquery-calendar/

The new jQuery UI will be landing on Sunday, September 16th. This will provide a powerful new set of widget tools to the jQuery toolkit.

What to Expect:

• Draggables
• Droppables
• Resizables
• Shadows
• Sliders
• Sortables
• Tabs
• Accordions
• Selectables
• Trees
• Modals

Coverage and tutorials of the new features will be published next week. In the meantime, check out the latest jQuery 1.2

The JQuery Team just realesed JQuery 1.2.  A major new revision to the JQuery toolkit.  While there are many major revisions to the software.  Some features have been removed, many others added or updated.

Some Key revisions include improvements to the ability to use custom namespaces & queueing for animations.

Other New Features:

• Ajax
  • Partial .load()
  • Cross-Domain getScript
  • JSONP
  • .serialize() Overhaul
  • Disable Caching
• Effects
  • .stop()
  • %/em Animations
  • Color Animations
  • Relative Animations
  • Queue Control
  •  :animated
  • step: Function
• Events
  • Namespaced Events
  • .triggerHandler()
• Internals
  • Documentation Move
  • Expando Management

Find out more at jQuery.com

Name: ext Javascript Library
URL: http://extjs.com
Native Server Environment: None
Included Widgets: Grids, Layouts, Panels, Menus, Buttons, Form, Tree, ComboBox, Dialog, Tab Panel
Download Size: VariableOriginally developed as an add on library for the YUI toolkit, ext has emerged as a powerful and capable toolkit in its own right. Ext has a powerful focus on widgets and application construction similar to Dojo’s dijit system. It’s biggest strength, however, is the fact that it can float on top of just about any underlying AJAX library or stand on its own.

Some Highlights

• Powerful animation & effect tools
• Excellent editable grid widget
• Compatible with several major AJAX libraries
  • YUI
  • Scriptaculous / Prototype
  • jQuery
• Powerful Skinning System

Some Drawbacks

• A bit of a learning curve
• Demo’s & tutorials may not work due because they were coded for different underlying library
• Depends on underlying library for many key functions, some features don’t work well with all libraries.
• Focus on XML or JSON for some tasks & in documentation