In the Wild for March 12, 2010

March 12, 2010 at 11:20 am by Eric Miraglia | In In the Wild | 1 Comment

Here at YUI HQ, we’re working toward the next major release of YUI, YUI 3.1.0. Yesterday we shared some YUI 3 loader work that Adam Moore has done for 3.1.0. His “YUI 2 in 3″ project allows you to use components like YUI 2 DataTable simply and efficiently in YUI 3. Meanwhile, his loader improvements also mean you can bring in YUI 3 Gallery modules like Storage Lite with the same ease and efficiency. 3.1.0 will also mark the GA release of Satyen Desai’s component/widget foundation for YUI 3.

We’re also running the YUI 3 Gallery Contest, the winner getting a JSConf conference pass and $500 at Expedia.com to help with travel. You’ve got two full weekends left of hacking before the deadline!

In the meantime, there’s been a lot going on in the community — here are a few of the things we’ve noted recently:

In the YUI 3 Gallery — Jeff Craig’s Slideshow Module: Jeff Craig, author of the Chromahash and Crypto modules, has released his Slideshow module for the YUI 3 Gallery. His writeup on his blog provides a good introduction to the component, which he used for the Washington State University commencement site.

Recently, at work, we had a desire to update an instance of a flash-based slideshow widget on our commencement website. This widget did absolutely nothing special, but the real problem we had was that, we didn’t actually have a license for Flash, and the way the slideshow had been built, we needed to be able to build the SWF file from scratch in order to update the order. Since our users rarely come to us with anything that isn’t some sort of emergency, we had to take the flash files to another department to make our quick change and compile a new SWF.

You can read Jeff’s full writeup on his blog.
Stoyan Stefanov on YUI’s CSS Compressor: Stoyan has signed on to work on the YUI Compressor, and he’s written about the CSS minification component of that tool on PHPied.com: “Originally written in PHP by Isaac Schlueter and ported to Java by Julien Lecomte, CSSMin got a JavaScript port by yours truly some time ago. Because, after all, JavaScript is the language of the web, isn’t it? You can play with the latest git version of the JS port online here. I’m also happy to report that the JS port is now used in PageSpeed and YSlow (as you probably know Firefox extensions are written in JavaScript).” (Original source.)
Satyam’s YQLDataSource for YUI 2: “Thanks to Jonathan LeBlanc’s article on the YUI Blog I thought that it would be cool to have a YQLDataSource to make it easier to use YQL data in YUI 2 DataTable, YUI 2 Charts and YUI 2 AutoComplete. The table below is built using such a DataSource…The YQLDataSource does not require any parameters. It will automatically use the YUI 2 Get Utility to access the YQL servers using JSON format and providing a suitable callback. The DataSource just needs to be instanced like: var ds = new YAHOO.util.YQLDataSource();.” Check out Satyam’s full documented example for all the details.
German-language Screencast on Using YUI in DreamWeaver CS4: According to the author, ‘In diesem Film zeigt Ihnen der Trainer die Verwendung und Konfiguration des Web Widgets “YUI TreeView“. Sie lernen die HTML-Struktur dieses Widgets kennen.” This is a beautifully produced screencast on using CS4’s YUI support, focusing on the YUI TreeView Control.
Ajaxian Covers SVG Wow, SVG + YUI 3 Animation: Brad Neuberg notes on Ajaxian the debut of Vincent Hardy and Erik Dahlström’s SVG Wow site. Many of Vincent’s examples, including the flying song-lyric animation called out by Brad, are powered by YUI 3’s Animation library running within the SVG document.
Simple File Upload in Grails (using YUI Connection Manager): Simon Palmer shows you how he leveraged Thomas Sha’s YUI Connection Manager and Matthew Taylor’s slick Grails UI package to add asynchronous file upload to his Grails project. (Note: You may be able to lighten the kweight of this solution by not including the full utilities.js package but rather cherrypicking the components you need — in this case, that might result in just <script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?2.8.0r4/build/yahoo/yahoo-min.js&2.8.0r4/build/event/event-min.js&2.8.0r4/build/connection/connection-min.js"></script>.
Chris P. Jobling on Watching YUI Theater: Writes Chris: “This last week or so I’ve been watching a lot of Yahoo! YUI Theatre videos on JavaScript, starting with Douglas Crockford’s excellent five-part series Crockford on JavaScript and ending yesterday with Christian Heillman’s inspiring talk on YQL and YUI. This has inspired me to explore how I can use YUI (a JavaScript library) in the next version of my Proman dissertation project management application which will be needed for 2010-2011 allocation round in May. If it works out, there’ll also be some new teaching material for next year’s Web Applications module (EG-259). I’ll post more in the under the tag YUI on the Proman, Man blog as I get to grips with this stuff.”
YUI Panel: Changing Buttons and Re-using a Panel on Same Page: Ciitronian.com has posted a brief YUI 2 Panel tutorial: “The requirement was to make a modal panel in YUI, which work at its own as a activation widget using Ajax (YUI 2 Connection Manager). The idea was pop up a YUI Panel when a user clicks on ‘Activate’, that modal panel will allow the user to enter details of when he/she wants to schedule the activation (where user can choose now or a later date) and then user can hit Submit and Cancel buttons.” Click through for the full tutorial.
YUI 2 Calendar: Using and Modifying Multiple Calendar Picker Instances on Single Page: Ciitronian.com “explains how to create multiple instances of calendar widget of YUI 2. There are many examples of how to use Calendar widget on YUI’s official website but for my application, the requirement was to to schedule multiple actions on the same page, giving each one a date of its own, so I developed my calendar widget” to solve that problem. Click through for the full tutorial.