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5 jQuery UI Frameworks for Web Developers

jQuery is a very powerful tool.It is a lightweight, cross-browser compliant, incredibly awesome and extremely powerful JavaScript framework (library) that emphasizes and simplifies interaction between JavaScript, CSS and HTML.jQuery UI is the collection of animated visual effects, themes and GUI widgets. jQuery along with jQuery UI are the open source and free software that are distributed by jQuery Foundation.

In this article we have put together a list of Best jQuery UI Frameworks which help to create useful and innovative mobile applications for your clients.

 jQuery UI Frameworks for Developers

jQUery UI

jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library. Whether you’re building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.The notable components of the jQuery UI are Tree View, Combo and Form Widgets, Color Picker, Charts, File Uploader, RTL Support and Validation.

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Kendo UI

Kendo UI is popular and widely used framework for building mobile web applications easily, this is an advanced mobile framework that is used for building native-like mobile apps and website.There are full sets of powerful HTML5 widgets and interactions. These sets can either be used in combination or single in order to create the interaction for application development.

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Wijmo

Wijmo is a line of HTML5 and JavaScript products for enterprise application development. Wijmo widgets are optimized for client-side web development and utilize the power of jQuery for superior performance and ease of use.This UI is optimized in such a way that it became a useful client-side web development tool. This tool utilizes the power of jQuery and delivers superior performance.

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JQuery Easy UI

jQuery EasyUI provides easy to use components for web developers, which is built on the popular jQuery core and HTML5. These make your applications suitable for today’s web. It is regarded as the feature-rich widget that has lot of interactive components. These components are based on popular jQuery codes and HTML5. Few of the essential most important features of this UI are Panel, Layout, Window, which are the UI design widgets.

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PrimeUI

PrimeUIPrimeUI is a collection of rich javascript widgets based on jQuery UI. PrimeUI is a spin-off from the popular JavaServer Faces Component Suite.Prime UI has more than 35 jQuery based widgets. It is powered by HTML5 and it contains ThemeRoller to offer you great themes for your website.

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Develop Desktop Application Within HTML, CSS, JS and Electron

Web applications become more and more powerful every year, but there is still room for desktop apps with full access to the hardware of your computer. Today you can create desktop apps using the already familiar HTML, JS and Node.js, then package it into an executable file and distribute it accordingly across Windows, OS X and Linux.

There are two popular open source projects which make this possible. These are NW.js, which we covered a few months ago, and the newer Electron, which we are going to use today (see the differences between them here). We are going to rewrite the older NW.js version to use Electron, so you can easily compare them.

Getting Started With Electron

Apps built with Electron are just web sites which are opened in an embedded Chromium web browser. In addition to the regular HTML5 APIs, these websites can use the full suite of Node.js modules and special Electron modules which give access to the operating system.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will be building a simple app that fetches the most recent Tutorialzine articles via our RSS feed and displays them in a cool looking carousel. All the files needed for the app to work are available in an archive which you can get from the Download button near the top of the page.

Extract its contents in a directory of your choice. Judging by the file structure, you would never guess this is a desktop application and not just a simple website.

Directory Structure

Directory Structure

We will take a closer look at the more interesting files and how it all works in a minute, but first, let’s take the app for a spin.

Running the App

Since an Electron app is just a fancy Node.js app, you will need to have npm installed. You can learn how to do it here, it’s pretty straightforward.

Once you’ve got that covered, open a new cmd or terminal in the directory with the extracted files and run this command:

npm install

This will create a node_modules folder containing all the Node.js dependencies required for the app to work. Everything should be good to go now, in the same terminal as before enter the following:

npm start

The app should open up in it’s own window. Notice it has a top menu bar and everything!

Electron App In Action

Electron App In Action

You’ve probably noticed that starting the app isn’t too user friendly. However, this is just the developer’s way of running an Electron app. When packaged for the public, the it will be installed like a normal program and opened like one, just by double clicking on its icon.

How it’s made

Here, we will talk about the most essential files in any electron app. Let’s start with package.json, which holds various information about the project, such as the version, npm dependencies and other important settings.

package.json

{
  "name": "electron-app",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "main.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "pretty-bytes": "^2.0.1"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "electron-prebuilt": "^0.35.2"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "electron main.js"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

If you’ve worked with node.js before, you already know how this works. The most significant thing to note here is the scripts property, where we’ve defined the npm start command, allowing us to run the app like we did earlier. When we call it, we ask electron to run the main.js file. This JS file contains a short script that opens the app window, and defines some options and event handlers.

main.js

var app = require('app');  // Module to control application life.
var BrowserWindow = require('browser-window');  // Module to create native browser window.

// Keep a global reference of the window object, if you don't, the window will
// be closed automatically when the JavaScript object is garbage collected.
var mainWindow = null;

// Quit when all windows are closed.
app.on('window-all-closed', function() {
    // On OS X it is common for applications and their menu bar
    // to stay active until the user quits explicitly with Cmd + Q
    if (process.platform != 'darwin') {
        app.quit();
    }
});

// This method will be called when Electron has finished
// initialization and is ready to create browser windows.
app.on('ready', function() {
    // Create the browser window.
    mainWindow = new BrowserWindow({width: 900, height: 600});

    // and load the index.html of the app.
    mainWindow.loadURL('file://' + __dirname + '/index.html');

    // Emitted when the window is closed.
    mainWindow.on('closed', function() {
        // Dereference the window object, usually you would store windows
        // in an array if your app supports multi windows, this is the time
        // when you should delete the corresponding element.
        mainWindow = null;
    });
});

Take a look at what we do in the ‘ready’ method. First we define a browser window and set it’s initial size. Then, we load the index.html file in it, which works similarly to opening a HTML file in your browser.

As you will see, the HTML file itself is nothing special – a container for the carousel and a paragraph were CPU and RAM stats are displayed.

index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>

    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

    <title>Tutorialzine Electron Experiment</title>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/jquery.flipster.min.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="./css/styles.css">

</head>
<body>

<div class="flipster">
    <ul>
    </ul>
</div>

<p class="stats"></p>

<!-->In Electron, this is the correct way to include jQuery<-->
<script>window.$ = window.jQuery = require('./js/jquery.min.js');</script>
<script src="./js/jquery.flipster.min.js"></script>
<script src="./js/script.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

The HTML also links to the needed stylesheets, JS libraries and scripts. Notice that jQuery is included in a weird way. See this issue for more information about that.

Finally, here is the actual JavaScript for the app. In it we access Tutorialzine’s RSS feed, fetch recent articles and display them. If we try to do this in a browser environment, it won’t work, because the RSS feed is located on a different domain and fetching from it is forbidden. In Electron, however, this limitation doesn’t apply and we can simply get the needed information with an AJAX request.

$(function(){

    // Display some statistics about this computer, using node's os module.

    var os = require('os');
    var prettyBytes = require('pretty-bytes');

    $('.stats').append('Number of cpu cores: <span>' + os.cpus().length + '</span>');
    $('.stats').append('Free memory: <span>' + prettyBytes(os.freemem())+ '</span>');

    // Electron's UI library. We will need it for later.

    var shell = require('shell');


    // Fetch the recent posts on Tutorialzine.

    var ul = $('.flipster ul');

    // The same-origin security policy doesn't apply to electron, so we can
    // send ajax request to other sites. Let's fetch Tutorialzine's rss feed:

    $.get('http://feeds.feedburner.com/Tutorialzine', function(response){

        var rss = $(response);

        // Find all articles in the RSS feed:

        rss.find('item').each(function(){
            var item = $(this);

            var content = item.find('encoded').html().split('</a></div>')[0]+'</a></div>';
            var urlRegex = /(http|ftp|https)://[w-_]+(.[w-_]+)+([w-.,@?^=%&amp;:/~+#]*[w-@?^=%&amp;/~+#])?/g;

            // Fetch the first image of the article.
            var imageSource = content.match(urlRegex)[1];


            // Create a li item for every article, and append it to the unordered list.

            var li = $('<li><img /><a target="_blank"></a></li>');

            li.find('a')
                .attr('href', item.find('link').text())
                .text(item.find("title").text());

            li.find('img').attr('src', imageSource);

            li.appendTo(ul);

        });

        // Initialize the flipster plugin.

        $('.flipster').flipster({
            style: 'carousel'
        });

        // When an article is clicked, open the page in the system default browser.
        // Otherwise it would open it in the electron window which is not what we want.

        $('.flipster').on('click', 'a', function (e) {

            e.preventDefault();

            // Open URL with default browser.

            shell.openExternal(e.target.href);

        });

    });

});

A cool thing about the above code, is that in one file we simultaneously use:

  • JavaScript libraries – jQuery and jQuery Flipster to make the carousel.
  • Electron native modules – Shell which provides APIs for desktop related tasks, in our case opening a URL in the default web browser.
  • Node.js modules – OS for accessing system memory information, Pretty Bytes for formatting.

And with this our app is ready!

Packaging and Distribution

There is one other important thing to do to make your app ready for end users. You need to package it into an executable that can be started with a double click on users’ machines. Since Electron apps can work on multiple operating systems and every OS is different, there need to be separate distributions for Windows, for OS X and for Linux. Tools such as this npm module are a good place to start – Electron Packager.

Take into consideration that the packaging takes all your assets, all the required node.js modules, plus a minified WebKit browser and places them together in a single executable file. All these things sum up and the final result is an app that is roughly 50mb in size. This is quite a lot and isn’t practical for a simple app like our example here, but this becomes irrelevant when we work with big, complex applications.

Conclusion

The only major difference with NW.js that you will see in our example is that NW.js opens an HTML page directly, whereas Electron starts up by executing a JavaScript file and you create an application window through code. Electron’s way gives you more control, as you can easily build multi-window applications and organize the communication between them.

Overall Electron is an exciting way to build desktop web applications using web technologies. Here is what you should read next:

Recover deleted photos from Android Phone

If you’ve ever deleted a photo album by mistake or had your smartphone accidentally wipe everything from your gallery, then you know that particular variety of ”bottomless pit in your guts” feeling. Never fear, your lost photos are not really lost at all. We’ll show you just how easy it is to recover photos on Android.

How to recover deleted photos from Android

First of all: turn off Wi-Fi and data connections on your phone. The reason to do this is that when data is deleted, whether photos, music or documents, it is not actually deleted until something has been written over it in the device’s memory.

All that is initially deleted is the index that points to where the data starts in your memory, so as long as you can find that point again, you can get your deleted pictures back. If that new data gets written over the top of where your lost pictures are, they will be lost forever. A poorly-timed update can be disastrous.

Note: this process requires root privileges on your phone.

1. Download a free program called Dr.Fone for Android by Wondershare (available for Mac or PC) on to your computer. There are other programs available, but we’ve always had good results with Dr.Fone.

2. Install the program, launch it and register. You’ll see the screen below.

how-to-recover-deleted-photos-from-android-1

3. Connect your smartphone to your computer with a USB cable.

You need to have USB debugging enabled on your smartphone for this process to work. If you don’t, simply go to yourSettings > About Phone and tap Build Number repeatedly until the notification appears, telling you that Developer Options have been enabled.

Back in your main Settings screen, you’ll see Developer Options down near the bottom. Scroll through the settings until you see USB Debugging and check the box beside it. You’ll see a notification at the bottom of the Dr.Fone screen saying that USB Debugging is being opened.

For devices running Android Lollipop, you will need to authorize the PC via the prompt that will appear on your phone.

how-to-recover-deleted-photos-from-android-2

4. Once Dr.Fone for Android has made the connection to your smartphone, you’ll be able to select from the following categories of deleted files. We’re only after photos, but if you’ve lost more than that you can tick as many categories as you like.

how-to-recover-deleted-photos-from-android-3

5. The next step asks you to scan for deleted files or all files. If you’re after a quick recovery of your lost pictures to set your mind at rest, take the ‘Deleted files’ option. You’ll need to accept the RSA key prompt on your smartphone (check ‘Always accept’ to make it easier), making the connection between the two devices secure and, of course, grant Superuser permission when prompted.

6. One this is done, Dr.Fone will analyze your phone and reboot it. If you receive a message on your PC to say your phone has connected again, ignore it; just let Dr.Fone do its thing. Any prompts on your phone that request permissions for Dr.Fone should be granted.

how-to-recover-deleted-photos-from-android-4

7. Once Dr.Fone has finished analyzing your phone you’ll get the scan results screen where you can check the boxes for the photos (or other files, as you can see below, depending which file types you selected earlier) that you want to save, then hit Recover and you’re golden.

how-to-recover-deleted-photos-from-android-5

8. If you’ve made it this far you’ve hopefully learned a valuable lesson and will make regular copies of your smartphone photos from now on. Don’t worry, we have plenty of tutorials on the site for that too.

The post How to recover deleted photos from Android appeared first on Source.

Top Languages And Frameworks You Should Learn In 2016

A lot happened in the software development world in 2015. There were new releases of popular programming languages, new versions of important frameworks and new tools. You will find a short list of the new releases that we think are most important below.

The Trends

In the last few years, there has been a trend towards shifting the business logic of web apps from the backend to the frontend, with the backend being delegated to a simple API. This makes the choice of a frontend framework that much more important.

Another significant advancement for the web as a platform in 2015 was the release of the Edge web browser. This is the successor of Internet Explorer which has an updated interface and faster performance. What sets it apart from IE is that it adopts the same quick release schedule that Firefox and Chrome follow. This is going to move the JavaScript community forward as updates to JavaScript and web standards will be available in weeks rather than years everywhere.

languages-and-platforms

Languages and Platforms

Python 3.5 was released this year with a lot of new features like Asyncio, which gives you a node.js-like event loop, and type hints. As a whole Python 3 is finally gaining popularity and we heavily recommend it over the older Python 2. Nearly all libraries are available for Python 3 and now is a good time to upgrade your legacy code base.

PHP 7 is a major new version that fixes a number of issues and brings new features and speed (see an overview here). PHP 7 is around twice as fast as PHP 5.6, which will have a big impact on large codebases and CMS systems like WordPress and Drupal. We recommend PHP The Right Way, which was updated for version 7. And if you need even more speed and don’t mind switching to an alternative runtime, check out HHVM, which Facebook uses and develops to run their website.

JavaScript also saw updates in the form of the ES2015 standard (used to be known as ES6). It brings us exciting new features and additions to the language. Thanks to most browsers adopting quick release schedules, support for ES2015 is great, and there is Babel.js which will help you bring your code to older browsers.

Node.js saw a lot of changes this year, with the community splitting between Node.js and io.js, and then joining forces again. As a result we now have an actively maintained project with lots of contributors and two versions of Node – a solid LTS (long term support) release, which gives stability for long lived projects and large companies, and a non-lts version which is quick to add new JavaScript features.

Swift 2 was released earlier this year. This is Apple’s vision for a modern programming language that eases the development of apps on iOS and OS X. As of a few weeks ago, Swift is open source and has already been ported on Linux. This means that it is now possible to build backends and server side software with it.

Go 1.5 was released a few months ago, and brough major architectural changes. In 2015 it has grown in popularity and has been adopted in leading startups and open source projects. The language itself is relatively simple, so learning it will be a weekend well spent.

TypeScript is a staticly typed language which compiles to JavaScript. It is developed by Microsoft and has perfect integration with Visual Studio and the open source Visual Studio Code editors. It will soon be quite popular, as the upcoming Angular 2 is written in it. Static typing benefits large teams and large code bases the most, so if one of these applies to you, or you are just curious, you should give TypeScript a try.

For the adventurous, you can try out one the functional languages like Haskell or Clojure. There are also interesting high performance languages like Rust and Elixir. If you are looking for a programming job, career languages like Java (which has some nice features in its 8th version) and C# (which thanks to Visual Studio Code and .net core can be run and developed cross platform) would be a good investment of your time in 2016.

Learn one or more of these: Python 3, Go, PHP 7, ES2015, Node.js, Swift, TypeScript

javascript

JavaScript Frameworks

JavaScript is a very important piece of the web development stack, so we are giving it dedicated section in our overview. There were two new standards this year – Service Workers and Web Assembly, which shape how web apps are developed from now on. There were also a number of new framework releases which we think you should keep a close eye on in 2016:

Angular.js has become the go-to JavaScript framework for enterprises and large companies. It has been known for some time that the next major version of the framework was coming, and earlier this year Angular 2 was released as a development preview. It is a total rewrite of Angular 1 and according to us is a great improvement over it. It is almost guaranteed to become the enterprise framework of choice once it is released, and Angular 2 experience will be a great addition to your CV. Our advice is to wait a few months for the final version to ship before picking it up, but you can read through their quick start guide right now.

React continued its ascend throughout 2015 and has seen new releases throughout the year and new projects adopting it as their framework of choice. It shipped new development tools a few months ago. Facebook also released React Native which is a framework for building mobile apps for Android and iOS, which combines a native frontend with React running in a background JavaScript thread. See a quick tutorial about React that we published this year.

Polymer 1.0 was released in May. This marks the first stable and production ready version. Polymer is based around Web Components, which is a standard for packaging HTML, JS and CSS into isolated widgets that can be imported into your web apps. Web Components are only supported in Chrome and Opera at the moment, but Polymer makes them available everywhere.

Ember.js also saw a new release. Ember 2 brings modularity and removes deprecated features and optimizes the codebase. Ember follows semantic versioning and maintainers of the framework are careful to make updating as easy as possible. If you need a framework with stability and easy migration to new versions, you can give Ember a try.

Learn one of these: Angular 2, React, Ember.js, Polymer, Web Components, Service Workers

frontend

Frontend

Bootstrap has become even more popular in the last year and is turning into a web development standard. Version 4 will come out in the next few months, which brings flexbox support and integrates SASS. It promises a smooth transition from V3 (unlike what we saw with v2 to v3 a couple of years ago), so you can feel confident that what you learn about Bootstrap 3 will be applicable to version 4.

Foundation is another frontend framework that is an alternative to Bootstrap. Version 6 was released earlier this year, which focuses on modularity so that you can include only the pieces that you need for a faster load time.

MDL is an official framework by Google for building material design web apps. It was released earlier this year and has a similar goal to Google’s other framework – Polymer, but is much easier to get started with. We have a wonderful overview which compares MDL with Bootstrap.

CSS preprocessors continue improving. Less and SASS are the two most popular at the moment, with mostly comparable feature sets. However, the news that Bootstrap 4 is migrating over to SASS gives it a slight edge over Less as the preprocessor to learn in 2016. Also, there is the newer PostCSS tool that is gaining mind share, but we recommend it only for devs which already have experience with preprocessors.

Learn one or more of these: Bootstrap, MDL, Foundation, SASS, LESS, PostCSS

backend

Backend

There has been a clear trend in web development over the last few years. More and more of our apps’ logic is shifted to the frontend, and the backend is only treated as an API. However there is still room for classic HTML-generating web apps, which is why we think that learning a classic full stack framework is still important.

Depending on which language you prefer, you have plenty of choice. For PHP you have Symfony, Zend, Laravel (and Lumen, its new lightweight alternative for APIs), Slim and more. For Python – Django and Flask. For Ruby – Rails and Sinatra. For Java – Play and Spark. For Node.js you have Express, Hapi and Sails.js, and for Go you have Revel.

AWS Lambda was released last year, but the concept is now established and ready for production. This is a service which eliminates backend servers entirely and is infinitely scaleable. You can define functions which are called on specific conditions or when routes of your API are visited. This means that you can have an entirely serverless backend which you don’t have to think about.

Another trend are static site generators like Jekyll and Octopress (see a complete list here). These tools take a number of source files like text and images, and create an entire website with prerendered HTML pages. Developers, who would normally set up a WordPress blog with a database and an admin area, now prefer to generate their HTML pages ahead of time and only upload a static version of their site. This has the benefits of increased security (no backend to hack and database to manage) and fantastic performance. Combined with CDNs like MaxCDN and CloudFlare clients can request a page of the website and receive it from a server nearby, greatly reducing latency.

Learn one of these: A full stack backend framework, AWS Lambda, A static site generator

cms

CMS

We’ve included two of the most popular CMS systems here. Both are written in PHP and are easy to deploy and get started with. They enjoy big speedups from the new PHP 7 release.

In recent years WordPress has become much more than a simple blogging platform. It is a fully fledged CMS/Framework with plugins that make it possible to run any kind of website. High quality WordPress themes are a big market, and lots of freelancers make their living by developing for WordPress. With projects like WP-API you can use WordPress as a REST API backend.

Drupal 8 was released this year. It is a full rewrite that focuses on modern development practices. It makes use of Symfony 2 components and Composer packages and the Twig templating engine. Millions of websites run Drupal, and it is a good choice for content heavy portals.

databases

Databases

This year the web development community lost some of its enthusiasm for NoSQL databases, and instead returned to relational databases like Postgres and MySQL. Notable exceptions to this trend are RethinkDB and Redis which gained mind share, and we recommend that you try them out in 2016.

Postgres is a popular relational database engine which sees a lot of development activity and is constantly improved with new features. Version 9.5 is expected soon. It will bring better support for JSONB columns for holding schema-less data (replacing any need for a separate NoSQL database) and the long awaited upsert operation, which simplifies INSERT-or-UPDATE queries. You might want to look into it, once it is released in 2016.

MySQL is the the most popular open source database system and is installed on most hosting providers out there. With version 5.7, MySQL also offers JSON columns for storing schema-less data. If you are just starting out with backend development, you will most likely be looking at connecting to a MySQL database that your hosting provider has set up for you. It is probably going to be an older version, so you might not be able to try out the JSON type. MySQL is included in popular packages like XAMPP and MAMP so it is easy to get started with.

Learn one of these: Redis, RethinkDB, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL

mobile-apps

Mobile Apps

Mobile platforms are always evolving and smartphone hardware now rivals low end laptops in performance. This is great news for hybrid mobile frameworks, as mobile apps built using web technologies can now offer a smooth, native-like experience.

We have a nice overview of hybrid mobile frameworks that you might want to check out. You have the popular Ionic framework and Meteor which recently had its 1.0 version and is also suitable for mobile app development. Facebook launched React Native, which runs React components in a background JavaScript thread and updates a native UI, allowing you to have mostly identical code for both iOS and Android.

Learn one of these: Ionic, React Native, Meteor

editors-and-tools

Editors and Tools

The Atom editor reached version 1.0 this year. It is a free and powerful code editor that is built using web technologies. It has lots of packages available for it and a large community. It offers smart autocompletion and integrates with plugins for code refactoring and linting. Not to mention that it has lots of beautiful themes to chose from, and you can customize it by writing CoffeeScript and CSS. Facebook has used this extensibility and launched the Nuclide editor.

Microsoft surprised everybody when they released their Visual Studio Code editor earlier this year. It is a lightweight IDE that supports a number of languages and runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. It offers the powerful IntelliSense code inspection feature and integrates a debugger for ASP.Net and Node.js.

NPM, the package manager of Node.js, has exploded in popularity and has become the packaging standard for frontend and node developers. This is the easiest way to manage the JavaScript dependencies for your project and getting started with it is easy.

Even for a solo developer Git is a necessity these days. Its serverless model allows you to turn any folder into a version controlled repository, which you can then push to Bitbucket or Github, and sync across computers. If you haven’t used Git yet, we recommend that you add it to your list of things to learn in 2016.

Learn one of these: Atom, Visual Studio Code, NPM, Git

making-things

Making Things

The Raspberry PI foundation delivered an early Christmas present this year, with the release of the Raspberry PI Zero – a $5 computer that is fast and power efficient. It runs Linux, so you can turn it into a server, a home automation device, a smart mirror, or to embed it into a dumb appliance and create that internet enabled coffee brewer you’ve been dreaming of. 2016 is the year to get a Raspberry.

Onto An Awesome 2016!

We’ve had a great 2015 and by the looks of it 2016 is going to be even more awesome. What’s on your list of things to learn in 2016?