In the Wild for August 13, 2010

August 13, 2010 at 10:59 am by Eric Miraglia | In In the Wild | Comments Off

Here are a few of the news stories that have caught our eye in the YUI community over the past few weeks. As always, let me know @yuilibrary or in the comments below if I missed something.

Detailed YUI 2.8.0 Rich Text Editor Article from Satyam and Packt: Satyam (Daniel Barreiro), as part of his new Packt volume YUI 2.8: Learning the Library, has published an extensive writeup on the YUI 2 Rich Text Editor on the Packt website. You can check it out here.
Excellent Coverage of the YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release on Sitepoint by @rssaddict: Louis Simoneau wrote up a nice review of the YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1 that we issued on July 26. Writes Louis: “A lot of [the new] features seem to have a common thread: HTML5 and mobile platforms. I’m sure that’s no accident, and it’s great to see more and better developer tools entering this space. As I said, there’s a lot more than just these features, so if you’re a YUI fan—or if you’ve yet to check it out—head on over and grab yourself a copy of the preview to play around with.”
Dion Almaer on YUI 3.2.0′s Capability-based Loading: Dion Almaer has a nice article up on his personal blog about capability-based loading, a feature YUI engineer Adam Moore has added to YUI 3 and which is included in the first YUI 3.2.0 preview release. Dion reviews the state of capability-based loading in his article, starting with Google’s GWT and progressing to similar support in other JavaScript libraries. “And this brings us to YUI,” says Dion. “I was really excited to see some of the features in the YUI 3.2.0 preview release. Great stuff for touch/gesture support, but what stood out for me was ‘YUI’s intrinsic Loader now supports capability-based loading’. A-ha!” You can read Dion’s full report here.
Pat Cavit Tutorial on Writing YUI 3 Plugins: Pat Cavit has a new tutorial up that details the creation of YUI 3 Plugins: “At their core YUI3 Plugins are a way to add new behavior to JS objects. It’s really just that simple. Going into it a little deeper you can explain the idea behind them as providing a framework-backed way to add new functionality & behaviors to host objects without the host needing to know anything about the plugins. Taking advantage of this means that you can add lots of functionality to your objects without requiring a lot of code. It’s another example of YUI3′s great support for modularity of code. Want your widget to accept flaboozulms? Write a plugin! Want your widget to support flaboozulms & flibberdybops? Write a plugin for flibberdybops & then use both the flaboozulms & flibberdybops plugins together. It’s a really powerful idea.” Check out his blog for the full article.
Sample Chapter on YUI 2.8.0 Menu from Satyam’s New Book: Satyam has a new book out on YUI 2.8, and Packt has released a sample chapter from the new volume. The sample chapter covers YUI Menu and can be downloaded from the book’s page on the Packt website.
“Easy Sliding Menus” with YUI 3 by @andrew_cooke: Blogger Andrew Cooke writes the following in introducing his simple sliding-menu implementation based on YUI 3.1.1: “YUI 3 is amazing. It looks terrifyingly complex, but once you get into it, you can do complex things trivially. I use jQuery at work, and in comparison, YUI 3 feels like it was written by software engineers rather than people hacking web pages.” Check out his implementation of menuing here.
Coverage of YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1 from @codepo8 on Ajaxian: Yahoo! Developer Network evangelist Christian Heilmann has a nice article up on Ajaxian talking about the July 26 YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1, our first public preview of the next YUI 3 release.
YUI Test with the Jack Mocking Framework: Pawel Pabich has a nice writeup on his blog showing how he used YUI Test with the Jack JavaScript mocking framework to unit test some form-input validation and submission code.
Pivotal Tracker, an Agile Tracking System, Using YUI 2: This isn’t breaking news — it’s been around for a long time — but the Agile project management system Pivotal Tracker is heavily YUI 2-based, using the utilities suite, Container, and more.
Ruby Gem for YUI Compressor from @mjijackson: Ruby hacker Michael Jackson has posted his Ruby gem for YUI Compressor on GitHub. From Michael’s project notes: “YUICompressor is a Ruby module that may be used to create compressed versions of JavaScript and CSS code quickly and easily using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library compressor. The module is essentially a wrapper around the YUI Compressor (a Java library) that supports two different modes of operation: shell and native. In shell mode the YUI Compressor library executes in a separate process. Code is piped into and out of this process using the system shell. This approach yields good performance and is the default for MRI and other Ruby versions that are not able to execute Java code. In native mode the compressor is invoked in the same process as Ruby. This is only possible when using YUICompressor on JRuby. With this approach, compression speeds dramatically improve because the system does not incur the overhead of invoking a separate Java process for each compression.” (Original source.)
YUI is About.com’s Web Design “software Pick of the Week”: Jennifer Kyrnin writes for About.com: “Sometimes the easiest way to learn a web design technique is to borrow from someone else. Now, a lot of designers will get angry if you borrow their code, but Yahoo! has put together an entire library of scripts and CSS that you can use to create interactive websites. There are two versions of the YUI framework. Version 2 has been available since 2006 and is very robust and proven. If you’re working on sites that need interactivity, but also need to be very reliable, then this is the version you should use. Version 3 is what they call their “next generation” library. It hasn’t been as widely tested, and includes things that might be more cutting edge. But if you’re building sites that need more advanced (often beta) interactivity options, this is the version for you.”
Thanks, Alessandro: We enjoyed this tweet from @avernet…
Notes from @joedag32 on Building a Sortable List with YUI 3 Sortable: Writes Joe: “I’ve been working on building an application that will need an easy to use sortable list, that will fire off an event upon the list order changing. As simple as this sounds, it would require a lot of coding and cross browser testing to pull this one off with just javascript alone. YUI 3 allowed me to accomplish the above in just a few minutes. I’m not even going to try to guess just how much time it’d of taken me to do on my own. I made use of the Sortable Utility to make and unordered list sortable in just a few lines of code.” Check out his solution here.
AjaxDump’s AutoComplete Widget List: AjaxDump includes YUI among its 10 great AutoComplete tools. Beyond the YUI 2-based AutoComplete documented on the site, be sure to check out the YUI 3 Gallery autocomplete component from Nate Cavanaugh and Eduardo Lundgren — as well as their “text-box list” widget, which implements a lozenge-style autocomplete interaction.