We are pleased to announce the release of YUI 3.10.0! You can find it on the Yahoo CDN, via direct download, or npm. The YUI Library website has also been updated with the latest documentation.
This release has a number of new features and fixes since YUI 3.9.1. Some of these are listed below.
4x Attribute and Base Performance Improvements
As detailed in our PR1 blog post, we made significant performance improvements to Attribute and Base, starting at the AttributeCore and BaseCore layers, resulting in up to 4x improvement over YUI 3.8.1 for some common use cases, from the non-event based Core changes alone. We’re seeing even more significant gains when combined with the Custom Event optimizations discussed below for observable Attribute and Base implementations.
Backwards Compatibility Note
A significant chunk of the improvement mentioned above comes from optimizing the way we aggregate the “static” ATTRS collection for Base or BaseCore based objects. We now cache the results of the aggregation while creating the first instance of a given “class”, and reuse the cached aggregation for subsequent instances.
As a result, if you’re modifying the ATTRS collection of a “class” after an instance has potentially been created, you’ll need to change your code to use the new static modifyAttrs() method. This way the code knows the static properties have changed and won’t continue to use an out-of-date cache.
We didn’t come across any code in the library or during the PR which was doing this modification, so we believe this is a fairly rare case.
For more details about this change check out Bases‘s HISTORY.md.
CustomEvent Performance Improvements
Along with Attribute and Base, we also improved CustomEvent performance for some common use cases. The improvements started out mainly targeting the “no listeners” use case, however while working on this area, we also tried to make sure the “20%” features didn’t weigh down the more common “80%” code paths. These changes result in improvements from 2x up to 6x depending on the use case, even outside the targeted “no listeners” use cases.
For more details about the CustomEvent changes, see CustomEvent’s HISTORY.md.
Future Performance Work
There are a couple of further performance optimization areas in BaseCore and CustomEvent we couldn’t get to in time for 3.10.0. We plan to put out a PR for these additional optimizations early in the 3.11.0 sprint cycle. Like the ATTRS change above, they could have some minor backwards compatibility impact but hopefully the gains make them worth it (see comment ).
AutoComplete, Console, and DataTable Language Updates
YUI Contributor Alberto Santini added Italian language files for Console, AutoComplete, and DataTable. Thanks Alberto! Contributing language files is an excellent way to make contributions to the YUI codebase.
Y.Tree Improvements
Ryan Grove (@yaypie) has added an extension to Y.Tree called Tree.Sortable which can be mixed into any Tree class to provide customizable sorting logic for nodes. He has also added findNode(),find(), traverseNode(), and traverse() methods to assist with building extensions for Y.Tree. For more details, check out the HISTORY.md entry.
Deprecations and Removals
In this release we have officially deprecated Profiler. If you are looking for good profiling tools, check out the developer tools built in to most modern browsers, which typically include profiling JavaScript. We also removed the dom-deprecated and node-deprecated modules. They have been deprecated for some time and they were due for removal from the repo.
Using grunt for Release Builds
Dav Glass (@davglass) has converted the build system over to using grunt. Both dev and release builds are now done using this task runner, which has been a frequently requested feature for some time now. grunt also integrates with yogi to allow you to run both tests and builds. If you want more details on how to use grunt, please take a look at the new BUILD.md file included in this release.
And More!
This release continues the trend of having lots of community pull requests and issues fixed. There were a total of 365 commits by 22 authors between 3.9.1 and this release. There have been significant updates and changes to several unit tests as well as we continue to improve the CI process and weed out unstable tests. You can find out more about this release by checking out the previous blog post for PR1. There is also a change history rollup for this release.
PR Adoption
We would like to have more “real world” adoption of PRs in the future, especially for changes as broad as the infrastructure changes mentioned above, due to the level of customization on top of them. In addition to the unit and functional tests, this helps us validate the changes we make each cycle in real-world applications, and helps us avoid having to have a rapid point release once a new version is out. In other words, you can make a real difference in the quality of a release by testing our PRs in your staging environments.
A big shout out goes to Eduardo Lundgren at Liferay for trying the 3.10.0 PR out for us and letting us know how it went. (Check them out at JAX.de this week as well!)
Let us know if you have ideas to help with PR adoption across the community.
