An Overview of the Yahoo User Interface Library
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Yahoo! continue their developer-focused effort with the Yahoo User Interface library, a collection of tools, utilities and controls written in JavaScript for achieving dynamic, interesting and cross-platform web pages. It makes extensive use of advanced DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX techniques to help you easily construct rich and interactive web applications. In this article I'll be looking at these tools and utilities in detail and examining what can be achieved using them.
Although completely separate from other programming foundations and developer tools such as the Yahoo Widget Library for example, I think that Yahoo are trying to achieve the same thing here: provide something extremely useful to developers, get people interested and be recognized as not just a provider of news and search results, but also as one of the best providers of new technologies aimed at assisting people from all levels of experience to build better sites and services for themselves.
Let's look at each of the tools in more detail. There are six fully fledged utilities packaged into the YUI, plus an experimental one, and two beta utilities. The six fully completed utilities are: the Animation utility, the Connection Manager, the Drag and Drop utility, the DOM collection utility, Event Utility and the YAHOO Global object. The two beta utilities are the DataSource utility and the Element utility. The experimental utility is the Browser History Manager.
The beta utilities are as available to use as the rest of the package, but their APIs are still open to developer feedback, to give the utilities some time to be played around with by the likes of you and me before the YUI team finalize and lock down the APIs. The experimental utility is also released to the general public under the same premise, but has had even less extensive testing than the beta utilities. These utilities do not have the same levels of documentation as fully released parts of the package and may therefore require a higher level of programming competence to be able to use.
Don't let this put you off though. Once you've been using the YUI for a little while the syntax becomes easier to use intuitively, and developer feedback is an excellent way to communicate to the people behind the YUI exactly what we want to see in future releases. Although there is currently no formal way to request additions to the code or to provide feedback as such, bug reports and patch requests can still be submitted.
Next: The Completed Utilities >>
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