Mobile barcode scanners - wireless, cabled or built into enterprise handhelds - can be used for fast and simple data capture in business applications. This article describes the current possibilities to connect a barcode scanner to a web application based on jQuery or jQuery mobile with pure JavaScript - no PhoneGap or other hardware oriented APIs. In fact, it is so easy, you can start using a scanner in just a few minutes!

AJAX-driven data tables are a great tool to display large amounts of tabular data. Fetching the data in small portions via AJAX reduces network load and increases rendering performance, which is especially important in mobile web applications. Here is an example, of how the jQuery DataTables plugin can be used in a jQuery mobile app.

jQuery mobile has a built-in possibility to display dialog windows. However, once the dialog opens, the background goes blank instead of still showing the rest of the UI or at least a blurred or semi-transparent version of it. This article demonstrates, how to change this, making dialogs appear over a greyed-out version of the previous page.