Blog: Archive for May, 2007

Based on positive feedback to last week’s post (thanks!), I’m going to keep writing these In the Wild columns. There’s tons of great YUI content created by the community but it can be time consuming to find, and so I hope this roundup continues to be useful. (Also new this week is a Features Job Opening sidebar module on this blog. We hope it’s unobtrusive over there, while still getting the word out about a few of our key opportunities.)

• JavaScript Libraries: The Big Picture was presented at XTech in Paris last week by Simon Willison. Simon is the rare person who has real experience with multiple leading JavaScript libraries. Because of this he’s able to compare and contrast them with insight. He also gives great presentations, and this is no exception: the 52 slides provide an overview of leading libraries, their design choices, and his thoughts on the state of things.

• Another Tabbed Interface, a new post from Yahoo! London’s Lawrence Carvalho’s personal blog, shares how he built Draggable/Reorderable Tabs and Closable Tabs by extending YUI Tabs and Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) concepts.

• Creating a fancy slider in JavaScript using YUI on 20bits.com has some helpful tips for understanding, creating, and extending sliders. In my personal opinion, sliders–in all their varied visual manifestations–can be powerful interface widgets but are too often underused.

• Using the YUI Menu Control by Dan Wellman is a tutorial covering how to create a basic menu, how to render and display the menu, and how to change the menu’s styling. Thanks Dan!

• Remote JavaScript includes without the performance penalty is a two-part series by Ryan Grove. Fast is good, so take a look.

• ETags are not a panacea — Speaking of speed, IMB IBM Senior Technical Staff member Patrick Mueller writes on their developerWorks site about the role and impact of ETags and explores ways to make your sites and apps faster. In addition to the insights about ETags, he takes a look at YUI’s free hosting and has this to say (my emphasis):

  Good stuff! The Expires and Cache-Control headers render this file pretty much immutable, as it should be. When Yahoo! releases the next version of the toolkit, it’ll be hosted at a different url base, and so will be unaffected by the headers of this particular file; they will be different urls. This sort of behaviour is highly optimal for web 2.0-ey apps, which are wont to download a lot of static html, css and javascript files, which, for some particular version of the app, will never change. And thus, by having the files cached on the client in such a way that it never asks the server for them again, the app will come up all the quicker.

• Beginning AJAX using the YUI Library is the perfect little-step-by-little-step guide to getting started with Ajax and YUI from Estelle Weyl on the CSS, JavaScript and XHTML Explained blog.

• Planet Yazaar creates and maintains community-supported additions to YUI (Yahoo + Bazaar = Yazaar). One contribution to that site so far is a YUI Unobstrusive Javascript Validation from Jamie Curnow.

• ASP.NET Web Controls for the Yahoo! User Interface Library by Luke Frost Foust looks to be a very promising effort. He writes:

  In order to make these controls work well in an ASP.NET environment, it is a useful exercise to create custom web controls which can make it easy to drop these controls onto any ASP.NET page. Currently, the following YUI controls are supported: Button, Calendar, Panel, Tooltip, Logger, Menu, and TabView.

• When we put together this year’s internal front-end engineering summit at Yahoo! back in March — an annual event bringing together hundreds of our front-end specialists from across the globe — we invited Brad Neuberg to give the keynote. His speech was titled “Inventing the Future” and he blogged about the experience this week.

• BarCamp in Charlottesville on June 15/16 lists YUI prominently on their agenda, so if you’re in the Virgina area you might want to check it out.

• Molu – The Search Spider is a new search engine (in beta) that uses YUI extensively.

• Scott Jungling, Web Apps developer at California State University at Chico, has been upgrading their templates with a nice dose of YUI CSS Grids (and Reset and Fonts).

• Detailed steps to read data from a MySQL database and display it in a jMaki-wrapped Yahoo DataTable widget from Arun Gupta’s Blog.

OK, that’s it for now. If you have links for me to cover in the next installment (or feedback on the format) please add them to the comments, send them to me directly (natek at yahoo dash inc dot com) or tag them yui.blog on del.icio.us.

(Update: Note that I corrected two errors above: it’s Luke Foust not Frost, and Patrick Mueller works at IBM not IMB.)

On his Muffin Research Labs site Stuart Colville shows how to re-write HTTP request so you can quickly toggle between localhost and online resources. He uses the “fantastically useful cross-platform http debugging proxy” Charles to do the magic: “Through this method we can use some simple regex to re-write a request [pointing to] yui.yahooapis.com to [instead] point at YUI files in your localhost development environment. … Now when you hop on the train or flight you can simply turn on the charles and your yui dependent js will still work as expected.”

Dave Dash on his Spindrop blog shares a TextMate snippet for YUI em calculations. Because of the way YUI Fonts preserves font zoomability for IE users, the size of an em in IE is slightly different than in other A-Grade browsers. The conversion math for EMs in YUI is part of YUI Grids documentation, but he’s right that tools to do the math for us are nice. His snippet keeps Grids’ em units but gives control to “people like us who want to be super precise down to the pixel.”

The Web 3.0, 6 Bladed Razors, 7 Minute Abs blog has been the destination for a string of great posts from Zach Leatherman. Most recently he’s penned “YUI DataTable and You: Making the Marriage Work” as well as “Wash your mouth out with SOAP and the YUI Connection Manager.” Thanks, Zach, for contributing this good stuff (and bonus points for funny titles and writing.) You’ve been sharing your insights and thoughts about YUI for a while now, and I really appreciate it and am listening.

The Cheerful Curmudgeon noticed the nice things Dr. Dobb’s Journal had to say about YUI last week and chimed in with his observations on YUI and the process of choosing a library:

The key difference between Turner and Wang’s evaluation technique and my own is simple: I skipped the technical evaluation. The existence of the Yahoo! web site (and several other YUI-based sites) was sufficient for me. I felt no need to spend any time actually writing code to “see if it worked.” I looked only for the differentiators between the toolkits and the YUI documentation immediately leaped to the fore.

Lots of people are finding and loving Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript video series from the YUI Theater. Digg’s founder Kevin Rose wrote (receiving 1584 diggs) that “[The JavaScript Programming Language is an] excellent presentation and great insight on the history and basics. Douglas rocks, yahoo is real lucky to have him!”.

The same Crockford videos gave Philip Hofstetter “Newfound respect for JavaScript.” As he wrote after watching them, “[He] really managed to open my eyes… The day when I have seen those videos, I understood that I had the completely wrong ideas about JavaScript… If you are interested to learn a completely new, powerful side of JavaScript, I highly recommend you watch these movies.”

And finally, though it’s not big news that countless projects at Yahoo! use YUI, it’s been awhile since we’ve explored YUI use at Yahoo! in any depth. But we were thrilled to see that YUI had been a part of the new Yahoo! Green site. In addition to Yahoo! as a company pledging to go carbon neutral, Yahoos put together this new site to aggregate environmental news, create calls to action, and track progress. As part of the launch, Yahoo! co-founder David Filo announced that Yahoo! is going to donate a fleet of hybrid taxis to the greenest city in the country. Green is the new purple! Good stuff – corporations can’t always enact the best values of their employees, and on a personal level it’s gratifying that Yahoo! continues to do so with respect to environmental issues.