jquery ui positioning: bug?

[jeroen dijkmeijer]

Hi,
Yesterday i started experimenting with jquery-ui's positioning api but I think there's a bug I found it with my own little project and also with the jquery in action lab project (chapter 9 positioning) which I downloaded from manning.
I use jquery 1.5.1 in combination with jquery-ui 1.8.10 custom made for core and positioning.
the lab uses jquery 1.4 with jquery-ui 1.8.
I don't see the behavior for the jquery-ui demo site which is using jquery 1.4.3 with jquery-ui 1.8.10
The bug is that bottom and top seem to have switched. Looking at the tail and trying to align its bottom with the bottom of donkey's panel shows some unintuitive behaviour.

Anyone else seen this behavior? And should it be reported?

kind regards,
Jeroen

[Bear Bibeault]

To summarize: you get the expected behavior when using jQuery 1.4, but not when using jQuery 1.5?

[jeroen dijkmeijer]

No it only seems to work correct at the jquery ui site. JQIA labs and my own project are switching bottom and top for both object and destination. I tried using the same jquery js files used on the jquery ui site but the behavior remains the same (switched bottom and top).

Now it is getting bizar:
I wanted to visualize it using JSbin. Guess what? bottom and top are working as expected. However left and right seem to have been swapped: JSBin

regards,
jeroen.

[Eric Pascarello]

Do you realize that the UI library is built on the old version and that it will not be patched for the new version of jQuery. That is one reason why I hate using jQuery UI since it is always so far behind the jQuery core version.

1.5 is not supposed to be supported until jQuery 1.9 is out.

Eric

[jeroen dijkmeijer]

Does this mean that a certain version of jquery-ui is tight bound to a certain version of jquery? so jquery-ui-1.8.10 only working and tested with jquery-1.4.4 for example?
Regarding the JSBin example I mentioned earlier: it is working correct under firefox, the jqia labs chapter 9 issue is not (all tested on mac os x).
Safari is most of the times doing what I would expect.
Pitty that it is not working that well such a nice api, reminds me of hypertalk.

regards,
Jeroen.

[Bear Bibeault]

JavaScript libraries, alas, do not have the same level of dedication to backward compatibility that we enjoy with Java on the server. New versions of almost every JavaScript library risk breaking things that used to work.

jQuery tries its best to not break anything, and non-compatible changes aren;t made without a good reason, but such changes do happen.

Any upgrading of JavaScript libraries needs to be accompanied by full regression testing.

[jeroen dijkmeijer]

Thanks Bear for your explanation. Maybe I was expecting to much of jquery version compatibility. On the javaside same issues have popped with spring / hibernate versions and I remember back in the old days the websphere server jvm vs the sun client jvm.

It is all part of becoming a more seasoned jquery programmer, which even the best book (= your book) can't teach me.
instead I have to learn them at a forum from the same author. I haven't seen many authors providing this amount of after sales, after finishing their book. A big thank you!!

cheers,
Jeroen.

[Bear Bibeault]

My pleasure, jeroen.