Requiring jQuery UI.

Blake Winton

Yesterday afternoon, I watched a video from James Long about Mortar, which is a template for making HTML 5 Open Web Apps. Now, coincidentally, I’m starting a new project (in my spare time, obviously, since it’s a Sunday), and while it’s not an Open Web App, I saw no reason not to use the same tools they were using.

Of course, since nothing’s easy, I ran into a problem pretty quickly. My problem was that every time I tried to require("jquery-ui");, I got an error of “ReferenceError: jQuery is not defined”. There wasn’t a lot of information about how to fix it, so after most of an afternoon mucking around, I finally came up with something that seems to work, and thought I would post it.

  1. Go into your www/js/lib directory.
  2. curl -O https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.18/jquery-ui.js
  3. Edit the jquery-ui.js file. At the top add the line define(["jquery"], function (jQuery) {, and at the bottom, add the line });.
  4. That’s it. From there you should be good to go!

Now, I suspect there’s a better way to do this, and hopefully James or Bryan will jump in the comments and tell me what it is, but for now, at least this works.