jQuery UI in core?

If only to balance out opinions here, I think this is something we should definitely consider. jQuery UI offers a great drag-and-drop library, sortables, resizables, a built in date picker (!), sliders, javascript-based tabs, and a whole bunch of effects.

I don't have a good gauge of feeling of the success or failure of the project within the jQuery community, but the fact that the project is hosted on jquery.com is certainly a vote of confidence. Moshe, did you make it to jQuery Camp? What's the word?

There are a few aspects of the project such as the themes and the theme roller http://ui.jquery.com/themeroller that I have as of yet been unable to come up with an elegant way of implementing in the jQuery UI module. I'm guessing it would tricky to implement this elegantly in core as well.

There's also a larger issue of how to implement jQuery plugins in Drupal in general and how to upgrade/update core JS file (separate from a full Drupal upgrade). But I will leave that to another thread.

In my opinion, if we're going to bring greater usability to Drupal, we're going to need to offer users more user interface elements for their toolbox. I always point to collapsible fieldsets as an example of how starving developers are for some u.i. conventions and how much they'll use (and overuse) whatever they're given.

jQuery UI may not be perfect, but it's a good foundation that the jQuery community seems to be getting behind. We need a foundation that the Drupal community can get behind.

I would like to hear more from people with experience using jQueryUI 1.5 (or, even better, 1.6). The last time I gave it a serious look was back in the 1.0 days, and I was unimpressed across the board: poor code consistency; underwhelming features; poor cross-browser testing. Really disappointing.

That said, I would love, love, love to having it into core. I think it would enable an explosion of new UI creativity. And with Microsoft and Nokia on the jQuery bandwagon, jQueryUi is only going to be getting more and more attention and energy.

I guess I'm coming around to this idea. Originally I was against it because I felt it meant a pile more js code in core that not many people would get use out of. But of course it would only be added as needed, just as now you use jquery_ui_add('ui.datepicker'); from jquery ui module. And the files that core does use will only be replacing things like tabledrag.js and collapse.js so shouldn't count as much extra overhead.
The point about standardisation of how people do things is a very strong one. Tabs and drag & drop are becoming increasingly the norm on large sites these days and in Drupal we currently have so many different modules implementing this kind of thing in so many different ways (of course I'm thinking of my own module Quick Tabs in particular :-P).
And if we can have a jQuery UI Update module that works the way jQuery Update for D6 works now - i.e. never replacing core files but just changing the path they are pulled from to get the newer ones from the module's own directory - then that takes care of the whole keeping up to date issue.

Katherine

I would suggest to also include a standarized method to include jQuery plugins manager in core, if possible.

My impression as the "maintainer" (in the very loosest sense of the word) of jQuery UI module, is similar to Tj Holowaychuk and starbow's impression. I'm not in any way a JS person, so take this with a grain of salt, but the code I dealt with (this was around RC1 of 1.5) seemed inconsistent, difficult to understand, buggy, and under-documented. There also seemed to be pretty big differences in quality within the individual plug-ins themselves; some are high quality and have nice APIs, others not so much. jQuery UI as a whole is also like twice the size of Drupal core itself. :P

So, I don't know. I see the advantages Moshe and Jeff point out. I also like that it enables us to kick our interface stuff up a few notches. But I guess I would need to see some strong backing by the "big" JS people in the core development team who have some experience working with jQuery UI to be convinced to add 5MB of code to Drupal core, and be saddled with support requests about jQuery UI's bugginess in Drupal's IRC channels, as we are with jQuery's. It would also help if we exponentially grew the size of the core JS maintainer team, since we barely have enough people to go around covering the existing JS code, let alone increasing the loc by 20,000%.

However, something that I would definitely support, and could be worked on while we figure out a definitive answer to this question is a mechanism for central management of jQuery plugins in core so we don't have 20 competing solutions in contrib, and we could potentially ship with some of jQuery UI and not others, but make it really easy to add in the parts other authors need. I think that's a smart place for someone who wants to see this in core to put their time now, so we can revisit this question again closer to code freeze.

I should note that we're using jQuery UI elements for the Theme Developer floating palette to allow it to be draggable on the page. Currently our choices are to either create a dependency on JQuery UI module or just include ui.draggable.js (and ui.mouse.js) as part of the Devel distribution -- which is what's currently happening. Of course, if another module is adding it's own draggable library or doing things the "proper" way using the jQuery UI module, things can get either very inefficient or very broken very quickly. :-)

Having JQuery UI could be super helpful for even small bits like this.

-= Jeff Robbins | The Do It With Drupal Seminar =-

Talk of a core jQuery plugin manager has been mentioned in this thread. I've been frustrated by the complicated nature of the existing solutions. So last week I whipped up a simpler solution called jQuery Plugin Handler (JQP). It's an API module for use by other modules and themes. It doesn't require any module "wrappers" or PHP code for adding jQuery plugins to your Drupal installation. Just create a directory called "plugins" inside of sites/all (or similar) and drop in the plugins you need.

http://drupal.org/project/jqp

The issue to add jQuery plugin handling to core in D7 is here:

http://drupal.org/node/315100

-= Jeff Robbins | The Do It With Drupal Seminar =-

Not sure if jQuery UI is really ready for core inclusion. jQuery was pretty rough when we added it the day before code freeze, but I have a feeling that jQuery UI is not really stable. I occasionally discover bugs in it; a lot more than I discover in jQuery itself. That being said, we should instead add a general facility to Drupal that makes sure that only one version of a library is present, much like the behaviors module (iirc).