What's the best library to do a URL hash/history in JQuery?

Question

I've been looking around JQuery libraries for the URL hash, but found none that were good. There is the "history plugin", but we all know it's buggy and isn't flexible.

I am loading my pages inside a div. I'll need a way to do back/forward along with the url hashing.

mydomain.com/#home
mydomain.com/#aboutus
mydomain.com/#register

What's the best library that can handle all of this?

Answer 1

AFAIK, all history plugins do the same thing:

setInterval(function() {
   if(theHashChanged) {
      someFunction(oldHash,newHash);
   }
}, 500/*whatever*/);

That's pretty the core of it (minus browser hacks for adding history entries without clicking a link, etc.). It's always going to be buggy because it's a bit of a hack and there is no cross browser API for handling history changes.

On top of all that, the user experience for this sort of thing is not very good. Users don't understand when they have to click the back button 4 times to get off the page.

Answer 2

I recently looked at 3 different plugins - jquery history plugin, history, and jQuery BBQ.

They were all quite hard to setup, I did get jQuery.history working but it still had problems with IE7. So I changed to BBQ and it worked fine across all our target browsers (IE6, IE7, IE8, Fx3).

So I recommend the jQuery BBQ plugin.

Edit: here's a blog post I just wrote which demonstrates jQuery BBQ with cascading dropdowns.

Answer 3

I've had good luck with reallysimplehistory (nee dhtmlHistory). It's not jQuery specific, but it works in IE, firefox, and webkit, and doesn't require much setup.

Answer 4

Perhaps try this jQuery History plugin: http://www.balupton.com/sandbox/jquery-history/demo/ It provides cross browser support, binding to hashes, overloading hashes, all the rest.

There is also a Ajax extension for it, allowing it to easily upgrade your webpage into a proper Ajax application: http://www.balupton.com/sandbox/jquery-ajaxy/demo/

This is the solution chosen by such sites as http://wbhomes.com.au/ and http://gatesonline.com.au/stage/public/

Overall it is well documented, supported and feature rich. It's also won a bounty question here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3205900/how-to-show-ajax-requests-in-url/3276206#3276206

Answer 5

Have you tried jQuery Address? From Asual, the guys who made SWFAdress. Asual - jquery Address

The jQuery Address plugin provides powerful deep linking capabilities and allows the creation of unique virtual addresses that can point to a website section or an application state.