Blog: Archive for July, 2012

What Happened at Throne of JS

A couple of weekends ago I packed up my laptop and my horns and headed over the border to lovely Toronto to play Devil’s Advocate at the Throne of JS conference. This conference was different in that it focused solely on JavaScript MVC (or MV* if you will) libraries/frameworks and using them to build rich, dynamic web apps. I know what you’re thinking, seems like a perfect venue to promote YUI and specifically the App Framework components, right? While I could have done that, I decided to instead discuss the main premise of the entire conference:

“It’s no longer good enough to build web apps around full page loads then progressively enhance them to behave more dynamically. Building apps which are fast, responsive and modern require you to completely rethink your approach.” [emphesis added] – Throne of JS

We all want fast, responsive and modern web apps, but to build them, do we really have to give up progressive enhancement and completely rethink our approach to web development? I think that utilizing both the client and server in a coordinated way is a modern approach—by leveraging JavaScript in the browser to provide the responsiveness and the server to provide the fastest initial rendering of your app. Having this balance, instead of doing everything on the server or everything on the client, means work can be done in the most optimal place and hopefully provide a better experience for the user. Here are my slides from my talk which go into more detail:

Also, all the sessions were recorded, so you can watch and listen to my talk!

Being able to spend a whole weekend geeking out about JavaScript MVC with application developers and library/framework authors lead to many invaluable conversations. Oh, and that everyone wants data-binding, and it’s extremely difficult to implement correctly :).

I had a great time at the conference and visiting Toronto (which seems to be massively expanding!). I want to thank all the attendees and the other speakers for making the conference so great, and special thanks goes out to Meghann Millard, Justin Giancola, and the Unspace crew for organizing the whole thing.

By Eric FerraiuoloJuly 30th, 2012

Graded Browser Support Update: Q3 2012

GBS Changes

Specific changes for this update include:

  • Revised support for fast iterating Firefox browser; Firefox testing coverage is now recommended for the latest major, stable version of the browser.
  • Revised support for Safari browser on non-mobile; Safari testing coverage is now recommended for the latest major, stable version of the browser on desktop operating systems.
  • Discontinue coverage for Safari on iOS 3.
  • Add coverage for Safari on iOS 5.
  • Add coverage for WebKit on Android 2.2.† and 2.3.† explicitly.
  • Add coverage for WebKit on Android 4.†.

Browser Test Baseline

Internet Explorer 6.0 7.0 8.0 9.0
Chrome † Latest stable
Firefox † Latest stable
Safari Latest stable (desktop) iOS 4.† iOS 5.†
WebKit Android 2.2.† Android 2.3.† Android 4.†

Notes:

  • The dagger symbol (as in “iOS 5.†”) indicates that the most-current non-beta version at that branch level receives support.
  • No guidance is given on iOS or Android OS device usage. The recommendation is that you choose the devices that are most representative of your user base for each OS.

GBS Forecast

  • Discontinue coverage for Safari on iOS 4.
  • Add coverage for Safari on iOS 6.
  • Add coverage for Chrome on Android 4.1.
  • Add coverage for IE 10.

GBS Archive

By Eric FerraiuoloJuly 26th, 2012

YUI: Open Hours Thurs July 26th

Tag (YUI Gallery module)

For this week’s Open Hours we’ll be talking with Yahoo! engineer Stephen Murphy about his Tag module, which provides a way to hook into Node creation and insertion. It allows you to build components that behave more like standard DOM nodes.

Stephen will be showing us how the Tag module works, how you can use it in your applications, and why Tag can be useful.

If you want to learn how the Tag Gallery module and catch up on the latest YUI news, please join us!

Recording

The recording is available in the YUILibrary YouTube channel.

Additional Resources

By Eric FerraiuoloJuly 24th, 2012

YUI 3.6.0 PR4 Now Available

YUI 3.6.0 PR4 is now available to the developer community for feedback and testing on the Yahoo! CDN. Please take a minute to check it out via CDN or download.

The target date for the stable release of 3.6.0 is July 31, 2012.

You can check out the list of issues addressed in 3.6.0 PR4 in our bug tracker. Additionally, you can take a look at the current change history rollup for all components in the library.

PR4 also contains a couple of new modules: the ModelSync.REST extension, transitioning from its previous home in the Gallery, and the LazyModelList class.

We invite you to join the ongoing development discussions happening with the team over on GitHub. For support, visit our forums, or join other YUI developers live in the #yui channel on irc.freenode.net (a web client is here).

Thank you again for all your feedback and happy testing!

By Allen RabinovichJuly 18th, 2012

YUI TreeView Beta Moves to Gallery

A few weeks ago, we have released an out-of-cycle YUI 3.6.0 PR3 that contained a new widget, the YUI TreeView. The purpose of that release was to expose the TreeView to the wider developer community and solicit feedback and testing. We received great responses from quite a few community members — and even some pull requests with contributed features!

Most often, modules that have been released in a PR are nearly polished and have the quality that affords them a spot in the core of the library. Unfortunately, based on our internal discussions and all the feedback that we received, we decided that the TreeView is not quite ready for prime time. As it stands, it still needs a number of essential features and some clarifications in its architecture.

We are aware of many requests for the TreeView in the community, but we strongly believe that we have an even bigger responsibility to guard the top-notch quality of the library core. For that reason, we will not be merging the TreeView PR3 branch into the main YUI source tree, and we are cutting the PR4 and the later GA release without it. Instead, we have moved the TreeView, in its current state, to YUI Gallery, where we’ll continue developing it and getting it ready for a future move to the core of the library. Here are the relevant pieces:

By Allen RabinovichJuly 18th, 2012

YUI: Open Hours Thurs July 12th

Mojito

A few weeks ago we took a look at how Y! Axis is built using YUI and Mojito. Axis is a pretty advanced application, so for this Open Hours we wanted to show how to get started with Mojito by creating a more basic application.

Fabian Frank and Diego Ferreiro will be joining us to show how to create a basic Mojito application. Specifically they’ll be showing us how to:

  • Call multiple backend services.
  • Rendering a mobile-specific and desktop-specific view, while sharing model and controller logic.
  • Introduction to the Mojit Proxy, and how to seamlessly make client to server RPC calls.
  • Using Mojito’s view renderer to render a view on either the client or server.

If you want to learn how to get started with Mojito, please join us!

Recording

The recording is available in the YUILibrary YouTube channel.

Additional Resources

By Eric FerraiuoloJuly 9th, 2012