YUI! What / Who / Why
The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is a free collection of utilities and controls, written primarily in Javascript, that has been produced by the expert-developers at Yahoo! to make your our life easier as a web developer or front-end user interface designers.
It consist of a series of Javascript and CSS components that can be used to quickly and easily build the rich and highly interactive applications that today's web consumer excepts and demands.
The premise of the library is simple; often when writing Javascript, you'll come up with a fucntion that works perfectly in one browser, yet badly (or worse, not at all) in alternative browsers. This means that you'll often need a set of different functions to do exactly the same thing in different browsers (sucks).
This can be done for some of the major browsers without too much difficulty using standard object detection methods within if statements. However, this can lead to massively increased script files and unwieldy code that takes longer to debug and troubleshoot and longer to wrinte in the first place.
The YUI wraps both sets of code up into one object that can be used programmatically with one constructor, so instead of dealing with different sets of code for different browsers, you deal with the library and it makes the different calls depending on the browser in use.
The YUI is aimed and can be used by anyone and everyone but of interest primarily to front-end developers, as the main aim of the YUI is to provide a framework within which robust and attractive interfaces can be quickly and easily designed and built.
Trying to learn how to make use of the YUI without first knowing about the Javascript language itself is endeavour likely to end in frustration and disappointment. Anyway, the YUI can teach you advanced Javascript scripting methods, coding and security best practices, and more efficent ways of doing what you want to do. In some circustances can even reduce the development time of skilled developers.
At this point you might wonder why using YUI instead of other ui libraries. Yahoo! is extremely well estabilished, and at the forefront of cutting edge web technology and front end design priciples tested in their world class service provision environment. The YUI library is not only developer centric offering to come from these world class leaders and go on to achieve high levels of accomplishment and a following amongst developers.
Additionally, the library has already been publicly available for over a year and in this time has undergone rapid and extensive improvement in the form of bug fixes and additional functionality. Overall, it is not still in beta stage, and has been proven to be an effective addition to your development toolset.
YUI is not like any other UI Library, it's well documented, stuffed full of examples, and is extremely easy to use.
Links: The Yahoo! User Interface Library.
Next Company Presentation
"How to build cross browser Web2.0 Applications with ASP.NET and YUI."
Alessio Marziali - 08 August 2008
July 15th, 2008 - 22:43
Alessio — can’t wait for the asp.net/yui article…looking forward to that one! Regards, Eric