The JavaScript Power of Twitter Bootstrap

Twitter Bootstrap has a lot to offer to make the creation of web applications simpler, especially in the way of visual design, but it’s not all HTML and CSS. Twitter Bootstrap offers some very nice functionality built in via some jQuery plugins. Everything from Tooltips to modal boxes, from scroll spying to carousels, there are some very useful tools here to ease your development.

What is Twitter Bootstrap?

Up until very recently I had heard the term “Twitter Bootstrap” mentioned pretty often and had no clue what they were talking about. It sounded like a complicated JavaScript library for making front end applications. Well that’s partially right and also very wrong.

Twitter Bootstrap is several pieces of web technology combined to make the development of web sites and applications quicker and simpler. One of the largest and most useful components of the project is the CSS files they offer, which offer grids (responsive and fixed), great styles for many common elements, utilities, fixes, and a reset (using Normalize.css) to make all things equal between browsers. The only real problem is that all the sites that use Twitter Bootstrap’s CSS will look quite similar.

Twitter Bootstrap jQuery Plugins

But what we really want to hear about here is the JavaScript stuff, right? Twitter Bootstrap comes bundled with 13 jQuery plugins that simplify the development of common components found in many web applications, such as tooltips, modals, and accordions. They make it so simple, that often times, you don’t even need to write a single line of JavaScript to get the functionality running!

You can read all of the documentation for these plugins on the Twitter Bootstrap site. There’s nothing truly remarkable about any of these plugins. In fact you might start thinking that several of them are underpowered, but that’s the real beauty of many of these plugins. The plugins generally each just take care of one tiny task, which allows them to be flexible and combine with other plugins or use any CSS you want without making a mess of things.

If you’re a JavaScript programmer who likes to write jQuery plugins, there’s plenty here that you can learn from. They follow standards and conventions that have been established over time and they keep things lightweight and flexible to give the developer the real power instead of forcing developers to comply with their strict rules to make things work. Overall, I think the team who put this together did a great job.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a way to cut down your development time and keep things looking great, Twitter Bootstrap is a great tool that’s definitely worth taking a look into. Just head to their download page and choose the modules and components that you deem are necessary for your project and start coding. By the way, sorry for the short post with relatively little information in it. As many of you know, I’m very busy with a new job, and the new job is part of the reason I chose to take a look at Twitter Bootstrap. Anyway, God bless and happy coding.