= jQuery Bindings

Like Cocoa Bindings, but for the Web, jQuery Bindings brings the power of
functional reactive programming to everyday javascript coders. This library
acts as an interface between the popular jQuery lightweight javascript library
and the powerful Flapjax FRP system, hiding many of the details of FRP in a
jQuery-like syntax.

This library provides a powerful new way to build complex interactive systems
without fiddling around with callbacks and debugging of race conditions. Rather
than defining handlers for events, which are opaque and non-composable, you
instead define connections between *sources* and *sinks*. Sources and sinks may 
be an element on the page, or a property of one of those elements, or the value
of a cookie or an AJAX request. Selecting elements as a source, or binding to
a elements as a sink, is as simple as using the standard jQuery CSS selector
function. From there, you can merge, split and transform these streams of
information either using standard functions, or by defining your own business
logic. There is no need to worry about the control flow, just define the
information flow of your application and let jQuery Bindings handle the rest.

A fundamental concept in jQuery Bindings (inherited from Flapjax and FRP in 
general) is that of *behaviours* versus *event streams*. A behaviour always has
a value, no matter when you look at it. This makes them suitable for expressing
the state of your system. An event stream only has a value at certain points,
for example when you click a button or when a behaviour changes value. By
combining behaviours and event streams, you can express both the continuous and
discrete properties of your application. You can, however, freely convert
between behaviours and event streams using built-in methods.

Let us see an example of jQuery bindings in operation. We can easily bind the
content of a DOM node to the value of a text box by defining a connection 
between the two as follows:

  $('input#myText').valueB().bind('p#output')

If we wanted to, say, transform the value to uppercase then we could simply add
a transformation in the middle:

  $('input#myText').valueB()
                   .transform(function(txt) { return txt.toUpperCase(); })
                   .bind('p#output')

These transformations can be chained arbitrarily. More examples are available in
the examples directory.

= Installation

Make sure to include the jQuery and Flapjax libraries before including jQuery
Bindings. The version of Flapjax required has had some alterations made, and
is distributed with this library. 

The core functionality of jQuery Bindings is provided by jquery.bindings.js 
with non-core functionality in the other modules. Some of these modules have
dependencies on third-party libraries (e.g. jquery.bindings.cookie.js depends
on jQuery Cookie) so make sure to include those libraries if you use these
modules.

= Future plans

* Add support for dynamic node sets allowing bindings to be dynamic.
* Add support for a Protovis module.
* Develop a comprehensive test suite.
* Write better documentation and examples.
* Add support for automatic lifting of functions to behaviours and event streams
  in Coffeescript.
* Remove some of the noise from the jQuery API. Cleaner function names and
  namespacing.