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Yahoo! Releases OSS Ajax and Design Tools

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hey-we-should-check-those-out dept.

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."

5 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Yahoo UIL and Google Code pages by digitaldc · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Yahoo UIL page and the Google Code pages are both useful and coincidentally look quite similar.

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    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  2. Re:I for one find that... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Informative

    I seriously doubt that there are any real patents or other strings attached. I think this is more of a publicity and goodwill stunt more than anything else. As far as I can tell, there are no sophisticated components here, just the basic stuff that most AJAX developers already have in their toolkits.

    The list of components is:

    * Calendar
    * Slider
    * TreeView

    That's a pretty small list, and all are components that are fairly common in AJAX circles.

    The core utilities portion of the library is just Yahoo's convenience methods that help abstract away browser differences. Nice if you don't have wrappers like these already, but not very useful if you do. Many AJAX programmers will probably choose to stick with their own libraries.

    A few things that come to mind that are missing from this library are:

    * A text editor components
    * DataGrid/Spreadsheet component
    * Scrolling viewports
    * Feature-rich DHTML replacements for buttons, lists, radio buttons, and other common controls.
    * Application layout engine

    I'm pretty sure that Yahoo! has these types of components, but isn't going to share as long as there is more value in keeping them secret.

    All in all, it's a nice gesture by Yahoo!. Just don't expect a complete library. :-)

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    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  3. Re:Yahoo is the new Google? by stupidfoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Very true. Their developer APIs are the best of any major offering.

    Check them out here

    Their stated goal is to have startups use their APIs as the foundation for new sites/tech.

  4. Re:"Library", are you kidding me? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I take it you haven't actually downloaded the code then. There are libraries for animation, DOM manipulation, drag and drop, XMLHttpRequest management and event handling (in addition to the slider, treeview and calendar widgets). That's 30 JS files, not including the examples. That's nearly 10,000 lines of code!

    It's fully documented as well.

  5. this is not a widget library by Gopal.V · · Score: 5, Informative
    The important peices are *NOT* about widgets. This is about the ygPos,ygAnim and ygDom libraries which are invaluable to most people (at least me).
    The animation systems are actually pretty awesome. The cacheTween() functionality in there takes it very close to what I've been doing with flash previously.

    Morover, Y! has been using these for the past 6 months on different browsers before they open sourced. That part is really what most people look at.

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