Yahoo! Releases OSS Ajax and Design Tools

Cocteaustin writes "Today Yahoo! released the Yahoo! User Interface Library. This library is comprised of a number of dynamic HTML utilities and controls for building rich web UIs and Ajax applications. They are made available under an open-source license. In addition, Yahoo! released the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. This collection of design patterns for Web interaction is intended to provide Web designers prescriptive guidance to help solve common design problems on the Web. Both are free in both senses of the word."

Really good stuff

[Vivek Jishtu]

I tried out some of the JavaScript code they are offering. It is a nice library of functions for web application development.

Yahoo UIL and Google Code pages

[digitaldc]

The Yahoo UIL page [yahoo.net] and the Google Code [google.com] pages are both useful and coincidentally look quite similar.

BSD license

[Rob T Firefly]

Yahoo are releasing this stuff under the BSD License [yahoo.net].

When is a design pattern not a Design Pattern?

[BarryNorton]

When it's a UI idiom...

Re:I for one find that...

[zenquest]

BSD License: http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt [yahoo.net]

Re:I for one find that...

[AKAImBatman]

I seriously doubt that there are any real patents or other strings attached. I think this is more of a publicity and goodwill stunt more than anything else. As far as I can tell, there are no sophisticated components here, just the basic stuff that most AJAX developers already have in their toolkits.

The list of components is:

* Calendar
* Slider
* TreeView

That's a pretty small list, and all are components that are fairly common in AJAX circles.

The core utilities portion of the library is just Yahoo's convenience methods that help abstract away browser differences. Nice if you don't have wrappers like these already, but not very useful if you do. Many AJAX programmers will probably choose to stick with their own libraries.

A few things that come to mind that are missing from this library are:

* A text editor components
* DataGrid/Spreadsheet component
* Scrolling viewports
* Feature-rich DHTML replacements for buttons, lists, radio buttons, and other common controls.
* Application layout engine

I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! has these types of components, but isn't going to share as long as there is more value in keeping them secret.

All in all, it's a nice gesture by Yahoo!. Just don't expect a complete library. :-)

Re:Prototype still rocks

[at_18]

Prototype may rock, but the website (http://prototype.conio.net) sucks. It's only a page with a download link. So WTF is prototype? Where's the manual, or at least a quick overview of what it does? Not even the .tar.gz file with the library has anything resembling a function list.

I had to google around to find documentation, such as this site [sergiopereira.com]).

Re:Yahoo is the new Google?

[stupidfoo]

Very true. Their developer APIs are the best of any major offering.

Check them out here [yahoo.net]

Their stated goal is to have startups use their APIs as the foundation for new sites/tech.

Re:I for one find that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually some of the components are very sophisticated indeed. The drag and drop library is the best I've seen - it can handly logical groups of related elements, point intersection or area overlay modes, "padding" for drag detection areas, configurable drag triggers settings and more.

Re:"Library", are you kidding me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you haven't actually downloaded the code then. There are libraries for animation, DOM manipulation, drag and drop, XMLHttpRequest management and event handling (in addition to the slider, treeview and calendar widgets). That's 30 JS files, not including the examples. That's nearly 10,000 lines of code!

It's fully documented as well.

Re:Prototype still rocks

[lukewarmfusion]

My biggest complaint about prototype is the lack of clear documentation. I have the same problem with script.aculo.us [aculo.us], which has a wiki that is often useless to me.

For a really lightweight effects library, check out moo.fx [mad4milk.net].

this is not a widget library

[Gopal.V]

The important peices are *NOT* about widgets. This is about the ygPos,ygAnim and ygDom libraries which are invaluable to most people (at least me).
The animation systems are actually pretty awesome [dotgnu.info]. The cacheTween() functionality in there takes it very close to what I've been doing with flash previously.

Morover, Y! has been using these for the past 6 months on different browsers before they open sourced. That part is really what most people look at.

Re:show me the money

[Ilgaz]

Large portion of FreeBSD and Opensource respect from industry (and end users) came from Yahoo.

When people questioned seriousness of that OS, you could (and still) say "Yahoo runs on it". Conversation is over. :)

I have no idea why Google is "good guy" and Yahoo gets amazing misinformed comments on each story. They even called Yahoo "wannabe" when they advertised (existing for years) http://search.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]

(robots.txt exclusion, it exists at least since 1999 if you look to archive.org)

Re:Prototype still rocks

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll admit that the library sucks for documentation but third party docs on both the script.aculo.us site and on http://www.sergiopereira.com/articles/prototype.js .html [sergiopereira.com] both have decent docs for it they aren't easy to find but they are there and actually pretty good once you find the core ones ;).

Opera Users...

[Egataes]

...can't access a number of Yahoo! pages (nearly anything apart from their search page) due to a browswer restriction on Yahoo's end. I wonder if this extends to their other material.

Re:Yahoo is the new Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I wonder who else is developing JSON based APIs and if that is going to be the next big thing?

Lots of toolkits use JSON. Mochikit. DWR. Dojo. JSON's not bad, but it's nice to have a toolkit that supports multiple transports. SOAP may be a dead duck (or at least it should be) but it's nice to be able to sling arbitrary XML around with the same API's as you would use for JSON. To say nothing of the venerable old POST format for legacy sites: dropping in dojo with proxomitron blows the doors off of greasemonkey functionality-wise, but without an easy POST api, it's pointless for many apps.

Lord save me from "the next big thing". Once the W3C gets its hands on it, it's no longer useful as a standard.

Re:BSD license

[Cocteaustin]

Two separate things were released: a Javascript library under BSD, and a design pattern guide under Creative Commons.