Finally with help and support from my hosting service setting up a newer version of Django to run with a newer version of Python, Building UIs with Wijmo’s official site has been launched. It is just in time for the lucky winners of free copies of the book to join in the party. I spent the last Saturday writing the site and the ideas over the last month just came together.

Right after I finished my classes at Waterloo, I started writing my book on Wijmo. Wijmo is an advanced widget library based on jQuery UI, which is the most popular UI toolkit in the community. The preface to my book explains what the book is about:

Wijmo is a new JavaScript library focusing on user interface widgets. It builds on jQuery UI, enhancing existing widgets, and adding new ones. In this book we examine the Wijmo widgets essential for web development. The useful configuration options for 15 widgets are covered along with their usage scenarios. Most of the chapters take a code recipe approach for tasks that occur often in web development. Whenever you come across a widget or user interface component that you’ve implemented before, chances are that Wijmo widgets have you covered. The chapters in this book are designed to get you started using the widgets in no time. On the other hand, Chapter 6, Dashboard with Wijmo Grid, takes a different approach in building an application and explaining how it works.

I would recommend buying this book if you’ve already purchased a license for Wijmo or you plan to be using Wijmo for development. On my project at work and while writing this book, I have used Wijmo in combination with Knockout to put together UIs.

Building UIs With Wijmo was just published last month. I was originally contacted by the publisher to write the book because I had used Wijmo on one of my Github projects. The best thing is one favourite pet project leads to another. I will save that for another post, but for now there is a contest running on Fiddle Salad if you want a free copy.