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."

Yahoo is the new Google?

[Teetow]

So, while Google is expanding its new evil empire, Yahoo is courting indie developers? Strange days on planet earth...

Very nice - great little library

[us7892]

Both pages are clear and the library actually looks very good. Usually, Yahoo is playing catch up to Google, or so it has seemed. This time, Yahoo gets the upper hand. Google is becoming Yahoo, and Yahoo is becoming what Google used to be. Good stuff!

Not that any of this is ground-breaking, but it is a nice little package.

Makes Google's download package from last month look pretty lame.

Re:Yahoo is the new Google?

[hsmith]

more like, they are both competing for us to use their products. no matter what, we don't lose in the end. as long as the tools are free, i don't see a problem

Prototype still rocks

[esconsult1]

After using prototype.js [conio.net] for a while now, its hard to switch to a fatter library which is what the Yahoo library seems like. Each one has their good points, and pieces missing, but I think if you decide to use either, you can't go wrong.

There are some good snippets in there though, and Yahoo has done a good job of introducing code and web services to the developer community, much much more that Google has.

The design patterns are a very very good thing to expose. Although many of us might have been using similar standards, it sort of brings a number of them under one umbrella and into one place.

Hurrah! Clap-clap!

[SilentOneNCW]

I say, good show! As early comments have already noted it is indeed a strange month - in which Google is falling, losing popularity due to their stock prices and the whole China debacle, while Yahoo is rising, supporting OSS with a suprisingly useful package. I wonder if this is merely another bump in Google's ultimate victory or a shift in the paradigm, a potentially fatal one for Google. However, let this not take away from the original point of the article -- Congratulations, Yahoo!, and thank you. Your generosity will be remembered.

Re:"Library", are you kidding me?

[AKAImBatman]

"Library", are you kidding me?

Indeed. Most of the posters obviously didn't do much investigation, or are not that familiar with AJAX development. This is the same stuff you've been able to get elsewhere for a LONG time. The Blueshoes [blueshoes.org] and ActiveWidget [activewidgets.com] collections are a lot more useful, albeit not entirely free.

To be honest, I'm consistently frustrated by the status of OSS code with regard to the DHTML components necessary to support open source RIA technology.

It's because the market is still young. For right now there's money to be made in DHTML controls. As long as that's true, programmers aren't going to be giving stuff away. (Hell, I've got my stash of super-secret components, and I'm willing to bet that you do too.) Once components become more commonplace, OSS libraries will begin appearing.

Re:BSD license

[Ilgaz]

One of the reasons could be that Yahoo uses and advertises FreeBSD since they started.

I know at least 1 giant company started using FreeBSD because of Yahoo. "It can handle entire yahoo userbase" is really a huge "selling" point.

http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~cfonda/sudan/OSs/refer ences/freeBSD/Yahoo_and_FreeBSD.html [trieste.it]

Re:this is not a widget library

[Anonymous Coward]

Prototype adds additional members to the Object prototype in JavaScript, which breaks core language functionality (for var i in obj) and doesn't play well with other scripts. The Yahoo! stuff doesn't do this.

Yahoo!'s animation library is in a different class entirely from script.aculo.us . Script.aculo.us has some neat built in effects, but the Yahoo! thing can do multi-control point bezier curve animations with the path pre-calculated for performance. It's a very powerful tool.