Advantages of jQueryUI

Question

I am more and more tempted to try jQueryUI. I'm sort of scared, though, that whenever a feature I need is missing, it will be hard to customize the widgets to my needs, so rolling my own widgets as needed may be a ore secure bet.

In particular what I'd like to know is:

1. How difficult is it to go beyond the basic themes? Say I want to widgets to match the design of my site, can I do this?

2. What if I need a widget to do a more complex interaction than it is designed for? For instance I created a widget for multiple inputs which works like this. The user writes the input in a text field. If he clicks on a + button, the input is copied in another place, and the input text is emptied, and so on. All the input is then submitted as a multiselect. Now, what if I wanted to use jQueryUI autocomplete on the input field? Can I expect that the other custom interaction will break the widget?

In the end, is it worth the pain to use jQueryUI? I feel like I will lose more time in customizing it than I would in writing the widgets myself. Is this true?

Answer 1

There are lots of jQuery plugins out there that are very good. They can all interoperate with jQuery UI. I say take from jQuery UI what is useful to you, use other people's plugins where possible, and write your own plugins as necessary.

Answer 2

In general, I would say it is worth it to learn any library if you will be reproducing similar functionality. Even if you end up customizing it, your time spent on fixing bugs will most likely be far less.