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Yahoo Previews YUI 3.0 JavaScript Library

By Scott Gilbertson August 28, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Programming

Yahoo_logoYahoo has released a preview of the next version of its popular YUI JavaScript framework for web developers. YUI version 3.0, which will be released as a beta soon, has some fairly radical changes from the current 2.0 version.

With JavaScript-heavy websites like Flickr, Yahoo Mail, MyYahoo and Yahoo Sports, Yahoo has long been at the web’s cutting edge for producing rich, interactive user interfaces. The company’s freely available YUI library has helped popularize various innovations like drag-and-drop actions, tabbed interfaces and click-to-edit text fields on the web.

Among the new features slated for 3.0’s final release are much-improved performance, smarter loading to reduce a page’s download time and a combined DOM and custom-events model that makes it easier to work with all events in a unified way.

The downside is that a sizable chunk of the 3.0 code is backwards-incompatible. Version 3.0 is such a departure from 2.0, most existing applications will need to be rewritten to support 3.0’s features. The other, and judging by developer feedback, more controversial new feature is the inclusion of JQuery-style selectors. While optional, these selectors represent a significant change in the way developers write YUI code.

Many JavaScript programmers have long loved YUI precisely because of its verbose syntax, which required traditional calls to getElementById, rather than relying on custom selectors. The argument against custom selectors is that, while it might take a bit longer to write the more traditional code, the end result is far more readable and easier for teams of programmers to maintain.

Still, syntax quibbles aside, YUI 3.0 looks to be a nice upgrade. At the moment the project is in the early stages and not yet ready for prime time, but look for the first beta release around the end of 2008. You can view the full YUI roadmap at Yahoo’s Developer Network, or participate in the discussion in the YUI3 Yahoo Group.

In the mean time, check out Dav Glass’s Draggable Portal example which shows some of the new code in action.

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Tags: JavaScript
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