jQuery has been one of the more popular JavaScript Framework that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. Many developers like to experiment with it because it is fast and easy to use.

2009 has been a very exciting year for most of the open source projects, blogs and businesses. Over this past year, there has been tremendous growth in the jQuery community. jQuery released version 1.3 in January 2009 and more plugins have been appearing online as well.





As a jQuery fan, we like to keep up-to-date with the latest jQuery Plugins available online as often as possible. Included in this article are 18 great jQuery Plugins that was released in 2009.

18 Latest jQuery Plugins of 2009

Page Slide

This plugin allows any developer to recreate a similar interaction on their own website using a few simple lines of Javascript. By attaching the method to an anchor tag, pageSlide wraps the original body content into a wrapper and creates an additional block for the secondary content load. The slide is animated whenever the click event is invoked.

Lazyload

This plugin delays loading of images in long web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) will not be loaded before user scrolls to them, this makes the page load faster. Browser will be in ready state after loading visible images. In some cases it can also help to reduce server load.

Rotateimage

This plugin helps to rotate images made in pure Javascript + HTML5 canvas element and VML in IE.

Tokenizing Autocomplete

This plugin allows users to select multiple items from a predefined list, using auto-completion as they type to find each item. You may have seen a similar type of text entry when filling in the recipients field sending messages on facebook.





Markitup

This plugin is not meant to be a “Full-Features-Out-of-the-Box”-editor. Instead it is a very lightweight, customizable and flexible engine made to meet the developer’s needs in their content management system, blogs, forums or websites.

Password Strength

This plugin shows the strength of you passwords by telling you how long time it would take to brute force them.

Before After

This plugin helps to show the difference between 2 images, that let user to drag a slider over the images, which were sandwiched with one on top of the other, so that you could easily see how dramatic the changes were.

Ajax Fancy Captcha jQuery Plugin

This plugin helps you protect your web pages from bots and spammers. It is a new, intuitive way of completing “verify humanity” tasks. In order to do that you are asked to drag and drop specified item into a circle.

Roundabout

This plugin helps you convert a structure of static HTML elements into a highly customizable turntable-like interactive area. And now, It’s not just turntables, but many other shapes!

qTips

This plugin is an advanced tooltip plugin. It provides you with tonnes of features like rounded corners and speech bubble tips, and best of all it’s free!

Merrkat

This plugin can be used as a simple promotional tool, a roost for advertisements, or even as an alternative to a splash or entry page; Meerkat is unobtrusive, cross-browser compatible, and degrades gracefully if Javascript has been disabled.

MopBox

This plugin is draggable show box that can contain div, image , flashmovie, video, etc. If it has more than one children, slider navigation is shown automatically.

Text Resizer

This plugin attempts to solve one problem: that of resizing text on demand by the user, where the user is given the option to enlarge or decrease the size of the website’s text.

Threedots

This plugin is used in many scenarios in the display of online text where shortened, truncated representations are best used.

Live Preview

This plugin is helpful to provide a preview of what the comment will look like as the user is typing the comment.

Autosave

This plugin helps to track the state of a form and fires off events to save the form data when the form has been dirtied. It is usually being used to save changes of the user’s content while they are working in their content management system.

Endless Scroll

This plugin makes the page keeps loading with new items attached at the end, instead of paging through items using the traditional pagination technique.

jParallax

This plugin turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

Conclusion

We hope that these jQuery Plugins can help inspire you to create new interaction and usability for your projects, as it did for us. Join us as we look forward for more amazing jQuery Plugins in 2010. If we have missed out any other great plugins released in 2009, please let us know by leaving a comment below.