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Yahoo U.I. Library
February 25, 2006
Whoa! Yahoo has released their user-interface library under the BSD license. This means that anyone can use Yahoo's AJAX and JavaScript animation stuff for free!
I just finished writing a Scriptaculous/Prototype module for Drupal, but I'm actually considering scrapping it and starting over with Yahoo's stuff. It's really well documented and there's a LOT in there.
They've got several items that I would REALLY like to see in Drupal, such as a pop-up calendar date picker and an expandable tree. In my AJAX talk at DrupalCon someone brought up the idea of an AJAX-based outliner. There might be all the pieces in here to create that.
Hmmmm..... Research continues.
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a ajax calendar date picker
a ajax calendar date picker would be really great for entering in a lot of events.
Dojo Toolkit
Having listened to Alex Russel give a fantastic talk at FOSDEM in Brussels, I'm thinking he's a pretty smart guy with a slick toolkit for doing serious JavaScript development and that Dojo is a bit like Drupal: give it 5 minutes and you might retreat in disgust, but give it an hour or two and you'll come away amazed.
*However*, the big gotcha with Dojo is the absolute lack of degradability: it's all AJAX or it don't work at all. So, use with caution for core functions.
Dojo degrades fine, thanks
The whole point of the dojo approach is that you provide a widget skeleton which is plain HTML; dojo then initialises your widget "over the top" of this skeleton. If sufficient JS goodness isn't available to do so, then the widget doesn't get initialised and the skeleton is still there - so assuming you've been sensible and made sure the plain HTML provides the functionality correctly, degradation is perfect and seamless.
I second that
I would also love to see a pop up date picker. Once you use one, you just don't want to scroll through dates of a month any more. I you could do that, I would love it.
Outliner vs. weight
An option to use an outliner to arrange book pages seems preferable to the current 'weighted' system in-place.
Spajax
Hi Jeff,
I see that you are still committing code to the Spajax project. Does this mean that you've abandoned the thought of using YahooUI? Basically, I want to know whether we can expect on-going support for the Spajax module in the future.
Any way, thanks for the great module.
Nathan.
I've been researching DHTML
I've been researching DHTML toolkits for a new client project to rebuild their Informational website. To date, I've evaluated dojo, AjaxTK (Zimbra), and Yahoo's toolkit (Prototype will be next). So far I've been impressed with Yahoo's TK over all others, for the basic fact, the components seem to be decoupled and can work well with normal HTML which in my case will be used through out the site.
AjaxTK, is very OO JavaScript intensive, falling into a familiar Java world model like Swing, or AWT. First observation is that the toolkit is extremely heavy. Total size of the TK is 1 mb none compressed. And Im hesitant to say the Toolkit can be broken into decoupled components. The heading in the example AJAX.html include above all JavaScript includes reads “<!-- WARNING: Order matters. Don't re-order these unless you know what you're doing! -->â€ÂÂ. I did not find a nice way to integrate the toolkit with current HTML, the entire app seems to be build in Javascript, pinning new DOM objects to only laid out DIV tags. From an application standpoint the toolkit provides a great framework following a MVC architecture. For a full blow application, like the one the toolkit was built for (Zimbra’s web email client), it’s a great full blow Toolkit that will build your entire application. For a website, it might be over kill.
For DOJO, I agree with Boris Mann statement at first the toolkit is extremely complex. I gave it a good week and once familiar with the kit worked well. Without a good IDE (I use Eclipse with JSEclipse plugin) its a hard toolkit to see all classes, and features available. Documentation is light, I found the most information in the nightly build unit tests. I was extremely excited at first about the "Import" and "Requires" features of the toolkit. However over time, as I started to debug my sandbox application, I grew annoyed with this feature. Venkman was not able to see all the libraries in the application since the were not delivered via a standard HTML include. In the future this might not be an issue as more IDE provide feature for JavaScript development. If you need a extensive Event model, Dojo provides an Aspect Oriented model. If you are familiar with Java, this might come in handy. If you can get over the minimal documentation and the lack of traditional methods of javaScript includes, then Dojo might be perfect for either a full blown application or a simple website.
Yahoo toolkit, I've fallen in love with. They provide good documentation and a detailed online API. For Dojo and AjaxTk, I had to generate the JSDoc myself. Yahoo does not provide a full UI framework like the other two toolkits, which is ok for the purposes of what my client wants. If you are building a website and simply need some animation or an Event model, the toolkit gives this to you with easily integrated into your existing HTML.
I’m blabbing, but I hope this helps someone out.
Am I the first in line for this module?
I've already downloaded and looked at the S/P Ajax module, as I've used the S/P library independently for the last 3 months. Just working on my first Drupal sites at the moment and looking to implement YUI as it does look more powerful and better documented.
Therefore, if you do write a YUI Module, let me know and I can swap out my clunky includes.
Most of these features now available with..
With the development of Joomla 1.5 and the inclusion of MVC you can expect most of the solutions that you are seeking available in its library
Now Yahoo has acquired
Now Yahoo has acquired Zimbra, it would be nice if Yahoo could unify YUI and AjaxTk, if so developers do not need to deal with both, and clients do not need to download two sets of library.