5 ms·

YUI3 and a Quiet Revolution

57 points by triptych 17y ago

YUI3 is developing an 'apt-get' for extensions and web services.

skennedy 17y ago
Not to mention YUI 3.1 is released this week, 3/30/2010. On top of some new functionality, the development team is porting a lot of YUI2 widgets, fixing memory bugs, and cleaning up some of the abstraction.
mildweed 17y ago
"Imagine for instance someone writes a little snippet of code that lets you use jquery plugins in YUI3." Is that even really feasible?
mcav 17y ago
YUI 3 has a very cool module system. I'm really looking forward to when jQuery provides $.require() so that it can do something similar.
moe 17y ago
Can't see much revolution there. So they now have a plugin-repository and allow you to directly reference those scripts from your pages. That's great and all, except I don't want to embed external code that may change silently (or not so silently..) at any time. Here's a tip: People flock to jQuery not because of some bells & whistles like a plugin-repo, but rather because it makes one hell of a lot of sense at the very core. It just feels right™ and allows for very short and elegant code. YUI? Not so much. YUI feels more like someone took the "Java" in Javascript way too seriously.
- rgrove 17y ago
  "So they now have a plugin-repository and allow you to directly reference those scripts from your pages. That's great and all, except I don't want to embed external code that may change silently (or not so silently..) at any time." YUI 3 gallery modules are hosted on Yahoo!'s CDN, and are versioned. Once a particular version of a module is on the CDN at a particular location, it will never ever change, and URLs pointing to it will always point at that exact version. "YUI feels more like someone took the "Java" in Javascript way too seriously." This is a common criticism of YUI 2, but have you tried YUI 3? Carlos Bueno's jQuery - YUI 3 Rosetta Stone is an excellent source for comparing common jQuery syntax and idioms with YUI 3. If you haven't looked at YUI 3 before, you may be surprised: http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html
  - moe 17y ago
    Once a particular version of a module is on the CDN at a particular location, it will never ever change, and URLs pointing to it will always point at that exact version. Well, I still don't see the revolution. Javascript hosting is not exactly rocket science. So, okay, they have a shiny plugin store now. Great. Pig + lipstick? you may be surprised: http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html Thanks for that link, interesting comparison. I'm sorry to say that I was not surprised, though. There is not a single snippet where YUI is less verbose. In every non-trivial snippet YUI is more verbose, often significantly so. The difference may seem small in these trivial snippets but it hints at what happens in real-world codebases: YUI complexity does pile up exponentially, not so with jQuery.
    - rgrove 17y ago
      "Javascript hosting is not exactly rocket science. So, okay, they have a shiny plugin store now. Great. Pig + lipstick?" The "revolution" is not that third-party modules are hosted on the Yahoo! CDN. That's been the case for a while now. The cool part is that in YUI 3.1.0, using third-party gallery modules is as easy as adding the module name to your YUI.use() call: YUI().use('gallery-history-lite', function (Y) { // Boom, I'm using the History Lite gallery module. }); The real power here is not just that it's easy to use third-party modules, it's that it's easy to use third-party modules in conjunction with official modules, and YUI intelligently concatenates and loads them using combo-handled requests for optimal performance. And you don't need to worry about any of it. "There is not a single snippet where YUI is less verbose. In every non-trivial snippet YUI is more verbose, often significantly so. The difference may seem small in these trivial snippets but it hints at what happens in real-world codebases: YUI complexity does pile up exponentially, not so with jQuery." You seem to be asserting that verbosity === complexity. This is untrue. Where YUI 3 really shines is in large applications with many loosely-coupled components -- exactly the kinds of "real-world codebases" you mentioned. In these environments, YUI 3's modular architecture, flexibility, and consistency make it possible to keep your codebase maintainable while also ensuring optimal performance by allowing you to easily tailor the components loaded for a given page to suit the specific needs of that page, rather than having to load huge monolithic chunks of code that will never be executed.
- geuis 17y ago
  I agree completely. My company's site was set up with yui2 before I came on board. Maintaining that old code and being forced to write new features with yui has not been a pleasant experience. I am transitioning the site to jquery as soon as possible. I've looked at yui3 over the last few months and while it's better than 2, it's still a mess to work with. There's also performance issues. Jquery is simply more capable and more efficient than yui3 according to recent benchmarks
scorpioxy 17y ago
I am patiently waiting for YUI3 to finally reach the feature level of YUI2. I've used version 2 on a few projects and it was a pleasant experience all-in-all. The only downsides were it was too heavy and too verbose. I often resort to JQuery when i need DOM manipulation because its nowhere near as verbose as YUI2. As for the too-heavy thing, it was a compromise because it provides one of the richest widgets in all JS libs out there.(plus YUI3's module system is supposed to help)
parasctr 17y ago
Lots of people that have been using YUI2 will appreciate the new YUI3 modular concept. While using YUI2 if you wanted to use a basic version of a YUI widget/component you would have to include the all of that widget library. Now that has that behavior has changed and most of the widgets/components/modules have been divided in several smaller chunks that make sense. For example, YUI3 IO has io-base, io-xhr, io-form, io-queue etc. You could load any one of them depending you needs. No need to load all of IO. YUI3 has chaining similar the jquery (not as clean, I think) which makes is less verbose and pleasant to write JS.
krosaen 17y ago
YUI3 is much better than YUI2, and they learned a lot from jquery in making it expressive / terse. I even spent the better part of a week learning about YUI3 thinking I might use it instead of jquery. But then I found, and it's hard to explain exactly why, that I was much less productive with YUI3. I think that jquery is just so damn intuitive to use, I usually can guess how something will work. With YUI3 I was often left looking up something in the docs, or looking for an example (which wasn't so bad given YUI's excellent docs, but still, it's a hit when you can't just guess how something is going to work)

57 points by triptych 17y ago

YUI3 is developing an 'apt-get' for extensions and web services.

Not to mention YUI 3.1 is released this week, 3/30/2010. On top of some new functionality, the development team is porting a lot of YUI2 widgets, fixing memory bugs, and cleaning up some of the abstraction.

mildweed 17y ago

"Imagine for instance someone writes a little snippet of code that lets you use jquery plugins in YUI3." Is that even really feasible?

mcav 17y ago

YUI 3 has a very cool module system. I'm really looking forward to when jQuery provides $.require() so that it can do something similar.

moe 17y ago

Can't see much revolution there. So they now have a plugin-repository and allow you to directly reference those scripts from your pages. That's great and all, except I don't want to embed external code that may change silently (or not so silently..) at any time. Here's a tip: People flock to jQuery not because of some bells & whistles like a plugin-repo, but rather because it makes one hell of a lot of sense at the very core. It just feels right™ and allows for very short and elegant code. YUI? Not so much. YUI feels more like someone took the "Java" in Javascript way too seriously.

rgrove 17y ago
"So they now have a plugin-repository and allow you to directly reference those scripts from your pages. That's great and all, except I don't want to embed external code that may change silently (or not so silently..) at any time." YUI 3 gallery modules are hosted on Yahoo!'s CDN, and are versioned. Once a particular version of a module is on the CDN at a particular location, it will never ever change, and URLs pointing to it will always point at that exact version. "YUI feels more like someone took the "Java" in Javascript way too seriously." This is a common criticism of YUI 2, but have you tried YUI 3? Carlos Bueno's jQuery - YUI 3 Rosetta Stone is an excellent source for comparing common jQuery syntax and idioms with YUI 3. If you haven't looked at YUI 3 before, you may be surprised: http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html
- moe 17y ago
  Once a particular version of a module is on the CDN at a particular location, it will never ever change, and URLs pointing to it will always point at that exact version. Well, I still don't see the revolution. Javascript hosting is not exactly rocket science. So, okay, they have a shiny plugin store now. Great. Pig + lipstick? you may be surprised: http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html http://carlos.bueno.org/jq-yui.html Thanks for that link, interesting comparison. I'm sorry to say that I was not surprised, though. There is not a single snippet where YUI is less verbose. In every non-trivial snippet YUI is more verbose, often significantly so. The difference may seem small in these trivial snippets but it hints at what happens in real-world codebases: YUI complexity does pile up exponentially, not so with jQuery.
  - rgrove 17y ago
    "Javascript hosting is not exactly rocket science. So, okay, they have a shiny plugin store now. Great. Pig + lipstick?" The "revolution" is not that third-party modules are hosted on the Yahoo! CDN. That's been the case for a while now. The cool part is that in YUI 3.1.0, using third-party gallery modules is as easy as adding the module name to your YUI.use() call: YUI().use('gallery-history-lite', function (Y) { // Boom, I'm using the History Lite gallery module. }); The real power here is not just that it's easy to use third-party modules, it's that it's easy to use third-party modules in conjunction with official modules, and YUI intelligently concatenates and loads them using combo-handled requests for optimal performance. And you don't need to worry about any of it. "There is not a single snippet where YUI is less verbose. In every non-trivial snippet YUI is more verbose, often significantly so. The difference may seem small in these trivial snippets but it hints at what happens in real-world codebases: YUI complexity does pile up exponentially, not so with jQuery." You seem to be asserting that verbosity === complexity. This is untrue. Where YUI 3 really shines is in large applications with many loosely-coupled components -- exactly the kinds of "real-world codebases" you mentioned. In these environments, YUI 3's modular architecture, flexibility, and consistency make it possible to keep your codebase maintainable while also ensuring optimal performance by allowing you to easily tailor the components loaded for a given page to suit the specific needs of that page, rather than having to load huge monolithic chunks of code that will never be executed.
geuis 17y ago
I agree completely. My company's site was set up with yui2 before I came on board. Maintaining that old code and being forced to write new features with yui has not been a pleasant experience. I am transitioning the site to jquery as soon as possible. I've looked at yui3 over the last few months and while it's better than 2, it's still a mess to work with. There's also performance issues. Jquery is simply more capable and more efficient than yui3 according to recent benchmarks

scorpioxy 17y ago

I am patiently waiting for YUI3 to finally reach the feature level of YUI2. I've used version 2 on a few projects and it was a pleasant experience all-in-all. The only downsides were it was too heavy and too verbose. I often resort to JQuery when i need DOM manipulation because its nowhere near as verbose as YUI2. As for the too-heavy thing, it was a compromise because it provides one of the richest widgets in all JS libs out there.(plus YUI3's module system is supposed to help)

parasctr 17y ago

Lots of people that have been using YUI2 will appreciate the new YUI3 modular concept. While using YUI2 if you wanted to use a basic version of a YUI widget/component you would have to include the all of that widget library. Now that has that behavior has changed and most of the widgets/components/modules have been divided in several smaller chunks that make sense. For example, YUI3 IO has io-base, io-xhr, io-form, io-queue etc. You could load any one of them depending you needs. No need to load all of IO. YUI3 has chaining similar the jquery (not as clean, I think) which makes is less verbose and pleasant to write JS.

krosaen 17y ago

YUI3 is much better than YUI2, and they learned a lot from jquery in making it expressive / terse. I even spent the better part of a week learning about YUI3 thinking I might use it instead of jquery. But then I found, and it's hard to explain exactly why, that I was much less productive with YUI3. I think that jquery is just so damn intuitive to use, I usually can guess how something will work. With YUI3 I was often left looking up something in the docs, or looking for an example (which wasn't so bad given YUI's excellent docs, but still, it's a hit when you can't just guess how something is going to work)