OStatic

Preview of YUI 3.0 Shows Many New Features, Little Backward Compatibility

Development of YUI 3.0, the latest version of Yahoo's User Interface toolset and widgets for Web development, is now available as a preview release. YUI has long been a popular choice for client-side Web development, both because of its liberal BSD license, and because of the number of features that the library includes. YUI 3.0, when it is released, will offer a variety of new JavaScript classes and widgets. However, this will come at a price, namely compatibility with YUI 2.x APIs.

YUI and other libraries for Web development have become a standard fixture, partly because they make it easier to program in JavaScript, allowing developers to ignore browser differences and to use objects and methods that dramatically increase the coding process. While some JavaScript libraries, most notably Prototype, come without any higher-level user-interface widgets, YUI offers a variety of such widgets that programmers can use to create calendars, charts, a rich text editor, and even an image cropper that help to create useful Web applications. YUI also includes a variety of tools and effects for drag-and-drop, Ajax programming, and animation which would otherwise be cumbersome to write. YUI also includes resources for layout with CSS, to ease the creation of attractive Web pages.

What's new in YUI 3.0? Many things, both large and small, According to a posting on their developer blog, YUI will load more intelligently and efficiently than was the case before. Not only will YUI detect which modules it needs to load, and then download them from a server -- it will also join the modules' JavaScript source files together, in order to optimize download time. YUI 3.0 will change to a "YUI" namespace, rather than a "Yahoo" namespace. YUI 3 will combine DOM events with custom events, making it possible to work with all events in a unified way. Selectors, which are similar to those used in the jQuery library, will be used in a variety of contexts, and will make it possible to find and work with nodes on an individual and group basis.

The YUI team has announced a number of in-person meetings for YUI developers (and other interested parties) during the first week in September. These meetings are aimed at demonstrating YUI 3.x code, while getting feedback from current users about the direction that YUI is taking.

• YUI
• javascript
• prototype
• jquery

Share Your Comments