YUI 2.8.0: Storage Utility, ProgressBar Control, Swf and SwfStore Utilities

September 14, 2009 at 2:12 pm by Eric Miraglia | In Development | 19 Comments

The YUI team and project contributors are pleased to announce the immediate availability of YUI 2.8.0. This release brings in four new components (Storage Utility, SWFStore Utility, SWF Utility, and the ProgressBar Control) along with hundreds of fixes and enhancements. George Puckett’s release notes for YUI 2.8.0 provide a comprehensive overview of the changes.

Download the Core YUI package plus the YUI Loader; ~19KB.

Download the full YUI developer package, including source, documentation and more; ~14MB.

Configure your YUI implementation using the YUI Configurator.

New for 2.8.0

Four significant components make their debut in this release:

Matt Snider’s Storage Utility: Matt is the lead frontend engineer (and the first employee) at Mint.com (which uses YUI extensively; congratulations on their big news today) and the author of a popular JavaScript blog. Matt contributed the Storage Utility for 2.8.0, a meta-component for client-side storage that provides HTML5-style local and session storage interfaces across various storage mechanisms. With this initial release, Storage can employ one of three storage mechanisms: HTML5 Storage, Google Gears, and storage via the Flash Shared Object. With HTML5-capable browsers growing share rapidly, and with the prevalence of Flash as a fallback, this gives you reliable coverage for the vast majority of your users. The Storage API allows you to specify which of these three mechanisms to use and in what order to try them.
Satyam’s ProgressBar Control: Satyam (Daniel Barreiro) is best known to the YUI community as one of the foremost experts on YUI’s powerful DataTable Control, and he’s the author of important tutorials that have helped tens of thousands of developers make full use of DataTable. He’s also known as one of the most helpful members of the YUI community. With 2.8.0, Satyam contributes a new component, the ProgressBar, that further deepens YUI’s portfolio of UI controls. ProgressBar offers a convenient API, a wide range of custom events, and full support for Animation and its wide range of easing effects.
Alaric Cole’s SWFStore Utility: SWFStore provides the Flash Shared Object functionality to the meta Storage Utility and comprises a JavaScript API for storing text data with FSO. SWFStore supports on-the-fly gzipping of your stored key/value pairs, which helps you get better mileage out of Flash’s 100KB default limit (this can be extended if the user permits). While many developers will use SWFStore in the context of Storage Utility, we’ve also presented it as a standalone feature for those who wish to use it directly.
Allen Rabinovich’s SWF Utility: In 2.8.0, we’ve broken out Flash detection and embedding functionality into a separate shared utility. We have begun moving YUI’s hybrid Flash/JS components — including Charts and SWF Store — onto Allen’s new base component. (Note: If you only want to check for Flash version, you can independently included the swfdetect module, which populates YAHOO.env.ua.flash.

Additional Highlights

Cross-Domain Support in Connection Manager: Connection Manager (YUI’s XMLHttpRequest component) gets support for basic cross-domain (XDR) requests in 2.8.0. We have implemented the Flash-based XDR mechanism that was first released as part of the YUI 3 IO component. We’ve also broken out core Connection Manager functionality into a connection-core module, reducing your code footprint if you’re only using the basic XHR capability. Head over to the Configurator to update your dependency list if you want to opt in to this more slender package.
Event Delegation Support in Event Utility: YUI has long included a detailed event delegation example/tutorial, and we talked up the technique here on YUIBlog back in 2007. With 2.8.0, Todd Kloots has built support for event delegation directly into the library with the new Event Delegate module, bringing 2.8.0 to parity with the event delegation support we delivered in YUI 3.
Carousel Gets a Gallery: Andres Narvaez and Gamaiel Zavala, frontend engineers for Yahoo!’s media properties, have worked with Gopal Venkatasen to extend the YUI Carousel Control to provide “gallery-style” support with multiple rows of items. At Yahoo!, Andres and Gamaiel have implemented this feature on redesigned video galleries for sites like Yahoo! Sports:
Calendar Adds Support for Year Offsets: The new year_offset configuration property in the Calendar Control provides support for calendaring systems that are fundamentally Gregorian but whose zero-year is different than 0 C.E. (the Thai calendar is one of several such systems).
Dual Axis Support in Charts: Tripp Bridges has been hard at work on YUI Charts, and among many improvements for 2.8.0 he has added support for multi-axis charts.
Much More: Hundreds of bug fixes and enhancements are included in YUI 2.8.0; George Puckett’s release manifest provides component-by-component details of these changes.

Acknowledgements

Some of the most interesting new work in YUI 2.8.0 (including Matt’s Storage and Satyam’s ProgressBar) come from outside of Yahoo, and community involvement in the project continues to grow month by month. To those of you who contributed timely bug fixes and enhancements in this release, and to the hundreds who helped refine the library through high-quality enhancement requests and bug reports, thank you!

What’s Next?

YUI 2 development and maintenance continues. You can follow this work on YUILibrary.com, where the Roadmap will soon tick over to the priority list for 2.9.0. As bug fixes roll into the YUI 2 development tree, you can follow them in near-real time on GitHub. If there’s anything that’s not moving fast enough for you, fork the repo, sign a CLA, and start making pull requests.

The team remains hard at work on YUI 3, and we’re now finalizing the documentation for the upcoming 3.0.0 GA release that will bring the new YUI 3 core and most utilities out of beta. YUI 3 is also available on GitHub, so feel free to clone the YUI 3 repo and start exercising the upcoming release. Beyond the GA, we’ll continue to work on bringing widgets to YUI 3 on the new Widget stack and making it easier for the community to make contributions across the project.

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19 Comments »

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Wow, what an excellent release. You guys never cease to amaze.

It’s great to see so much of 3.x’s brilliance show up in the 2.x line.

And yes, +1 to Matt Snider & Co’s big news today!

Best,
Nate

Comment by Nate Koechley — September 14, 2009 #
Nice work, thanks!

How much longer will it be until YUI 2.x is superceded by 3.x?

By the way, the link to the Storage Utility cheat sheet is broken: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/storage/

Comment by Gabe — September 15, 2009 #
Gabe — YUI 2.x will continue to be supported for a long time to come, and as you see with this release a lot of the development is now being taken on by people outside the original team at Yahoo that built YUI. That team is focused mostly on YUI 3 right now, and YUI 3 will continue to get the lion’s share of our attention as we complete the GA release and begin laying the foundation for widgets during the remainder of this year. -Eric

Comment by Eric Miraglia — September 15, 2009 #
Nice job, congratulations!
But you really should think how to reduce the period between two releases. Why do you need seven months in order to make a new release (YUI 2.7 was anounced on 18.02)?

Comment by Greg — September 15, 2009 #
Greg — Two factors have increased the time between releases: 1) We’re working hard on the next generation of YUI (YUI3 — http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/ ); 2) because YUI 2.x updates are available in realtime on GitHub, you have more and more access to the code as it develops between releases. In some cases, that has made patch releases less important as minor, issue-specific patches are accessed via GitHub. Regards, Eric

Comment by Eric Miraglia — September 15, 2009 #
I am happy to be one of the first batch of external contributors. The ProgressBar is not the greatest of widgets but it served to try out how to work with external contributors. Coding a complex widget and getting the workflow of the contributing itself straight with each end 9 timezones apart would have been too complicated.

So, praise should go to all who made it possible for those external contributions to be part of YUI 2.8. First of all Jenny, my sponsor at YAHOO, my contact over all the process, then those who came up with the idea to open it up to external contributions, those who provided the tools so that we can contribute and those who reviewed my original code and provided good advice in how to make it fit into the YUI library.

Thanks

Comment by Satyam — September 17, 2009 #
[...] Check out the more in-depth overview on the YUI blog. [...]

Pingback by Ajaxian » YUI 2.8.0 - Local Storage wrapper, better Flash interaction, crossdomain connections and progress bars — September 17, 2009 #
[...] A detailed post of the new features and important changes can be found at http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/09/14/yui-2-8-0/ [...]

Pingback by YUI 2.8.0 released | Ramoonus.nl — September 17, 2009 #
The dual-axis chart example should include a legend to indicate with which axis each series is associated. One way it could be done is to add icons to the legend for each axis, customizable of course, but the defaults could be arrows point left or right (or up and down for bar charts).

Comment by Josh Tynjala — September 18, 2009 #
I was about to complain that the SWF Utility detection ignored the minor version. As you probably know, Adobe announced earlier this year that Flash Player 10 updates with new features would receive a minor version update instead of always staying at 0 like Flash Player 9 did. It seemed to me that SWF Utility would break in this case. However, I re-read the announcement and saw that the revision would never reset in this case, and it would keep increasing. They did that to support “legacy” version detection scripts. While it’s nice to see that the SWF Utility won’t break, it’s still a little strange that a new script acts like what Adobe considers a legacy script.

Comment by Josh Tynjala — September 18, 2009 #
[...] Más información | Blog de YUI [...]

Pingback by Disponible YUI 2.8.0 | Mas Geek — September 18, 2009 #
Josh – Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to look into an effective way to visualize the pairing of a series to an axis. Your suggestion is good but I’ll have to add a functionality to the legend to allow for its markers to be styled differently than those of its corresponding series.

Comment by Tripp — September 18, 2009 #
Tripp, it doesn’t necessarily need to be the markers themselves that indicate the axis. Instead, it could be an extra symbol next to the marker and the series name.

Comment by Josh Tynjala — September 18, 2009 #
Good point. Thanks.

Comment by Tripp — September 18, 2009 #
Congrats to the YUI people for making another great release. The additions to the library seem great!

Has the yuiloader utility been fixed? Queue support would be great on it, i see it has already been implemented in yui 3 and it works like a charm!

More info on the problem here : http://yuilibrary.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1333

Thanks and congrats!

Comment by Alex Cazacu — September 21, 2009 #
Alex — Adam responded to that forum post this morning with more information. -Eric

Comment by Eric Miraglia — September 21, 2009 #
Josh,

When Adobe switches to using the minor version, we will update SWF to behave accordingly — both as a bug release for 2.8, and in 2.9 (and, of course, in 3).

Best,
Allen

Comment by Allen Rabinovich — September 22, 2009 #
[...] Hay otra serie de cambios interesantes en YUI 2.8.0 como algún otro componente para la delegación de eventos, un gestor de conexiones entre dominios, carrusel de imágenes, calendarios, … Para ponerte al día te recomendamos seguir el blog de YUI. [...]

Pingback by YUI 2.8.0 – Almacenamiento local, mejor interacción con flash y mucho más, Carrero — September 23, 2009 #
[...] been a busy month here with YUI 2.8.0, YUI PHP Loader 1.0.0 beta 1, and YUI 3.0.0 all hitting the wires — and with our first public [...]

Pingback by In the Wild for October 5, 2009 » Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog) — October 5, 2009 #

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