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Yahoo! Releases OSS Ajax and Design Tools
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."
awesomely generous. Hope there are no patent string attached.
So, while Google is expanding its new evil empire, Yahoo is courting indie developers? Strange days on planet earth...
Teeworlds - it's Super Mario Quake!
I tried out some of the JavaScript code they are offering. It is a nice library of functions for web application development.
I lost my signature... help!
With google's toys they all have mass appeal and drive traffic to the site, ultimately helping google's brokerage. This, while nice for some of us, doesn't. Why would Yahoo bother?
Both pages are clear and the library actually looks very good. Usually, Yahoo is playing catch up to Google, or so it has seemed. This time, Yahoo gets the upper hand. Google is becoming Yahoo, and Yahoo is becoming what Google used to be. Good stuff!
Not that any of this is ground-breaking, but it is a nice little package.
Makes Google's download package from last month look pretty lame.
The Yahoo UIL page and the Google Code pages are both useful and coincidentally look quite similar.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Yahoo are releasing this stuff under the BSD License.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
When it's a UI idiom...
If you look through their Design Patterns you'll see that each has an Accessibility section. Very nice addition and often over looked.
-- taking over the world, we are.
There are some good snippets in there though, and Yahoo has done a good job of introducing code and web services to the developer community, much much more that Google has.
The design patterns are a very very good thing to expose. Although many of us might have been using similar standards, it sort of brings a number of them under one umbrella and into one place.
Newsfollow.com
I say, good show! As early comments have already noted it is indeed a strange month - in which Google is falling, losing popularity due to their stock prices and the whole China debacle, while Yahoo is rising, supporting OSS with a suprisingly useful package. I wonder if this is merely another bump in Google's ultimate victory or a shift in the paradigm, a potentially fatal one for Google. However, let this not take away from the original point of the article -- Congratulations, Yahoo!, and thank you. Your generosity will be remembered.
games journalism blog
This is a collection of, count em, THREE main scripts folks. There are free libraries of javascript code out there with orders of magnitude more DHTML functions and scripts. Sure, Yahoo offers some derivatives of each of their primary functions, but one of the categories is a collection of "vented menuing" scripts that could have been written five years ago. Only a multi-national company bent on branding (and yes Google, you're in the same boad) could put up a page like that and call it a Library.
To be honest, I'm consistently frustrated by the status of OSS code with regard to the DHTML components necessary to support open source RIA technology. If you want to do a vented menu, have a slider control, or YADDA you can find about 450 million scripts scattered across the javascript repositories of the web.
What it comes down to is this; if you want to do a collapsible menu or drag and drop then you're in luck, we have the widgets in OSS for you! OSS RIA won't be feasible until SVG stabilizes and is as ubiquitous as the Flash plug-in.
-rt
Total Arse.
Patterns are nothing to do with languages. Patterns are not meant to fix problems in languages, they are conceptual repeating patterns, like 'the need to store', 'the need to display', 'the need to pass data'.
If your language of choice happens to implement one of these languages (roughly like struct or Object for the DTO pattern), then so much the better.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
It breaks things on webpages and is really pissing me of on their my.yahoo.com site. If you don't need to drag and drop things, why have them? If you don't need to open a page in a new window, why do it? I'm starting to really hate some of this AJAX stuff.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
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.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I sincerely appreciate the comments of those who know (much more than me) about web UI, techniques, technologies, and patterns. As a server-side engineer and developer, I don't spend a lot of time on the front end. It's nice to see how /.ers digest this type of information and re-present it from lots of angles.
With that said, I'd also like to say that the pages are pretty well done. It is obvious that a great deal of time and effort was spent conceiving, writing, and, producing these beginnings of libraries and instructions. I found the effort to be commendable and interesting.
For someone like me, these types of efforts actually help me understand quicker and keep me interested.
A Passionate Independent Musician
NP-complete problems are pretty easy (i.e. linear) when you encode them in unary. (Base 1). The size of the encodings become exponetially large so the computation time to solve the problem is now linearly related to input size. It's all a question of finding the right language.
* AKAImBatman thwacks nagora upside the head
The back button doesn't work if you land directly on the page. Breadcrumbs also provide information to the user about their location independent from the ability to move to those locations. Pay attention, young padewon.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Not really. Have you ever looked at their ads API? It can't even bgein to compare to what Google offers.
It takes about 90 seconds to sign up and start getting access to advertising data via Google's API. It's SOAP, so pretty much every programming language besides BASIC and Forth are supported. Google has loads of documentation online regarding their ad API program. And it's free. You get to do what you want with the data that you get back.
Yahoo has had an advertising API for 5 years now, but what does it do? What does it take to get access to it? We know it uses REST, but what data can you get back from it? How much does it cost? Where is the sample code? Is there a support forum where I can talk to other developers? What are the terms of service? Can I use it to get 3rd party access to others' data? Are there any other restrictions on using it?
The API page linked above doesn't answer any of those questions. Hell, the ads API isn't even listed on the developer resources page you linked to. Why is that?
So if I email xml-ysm@yahoo-inc.com and ask the above questions, how long before I get a response? Will all my questions be answered, or will I get more questions back then answers? Try it. I did last spring. It's an interesting response to say the least.
You're right in that Yahoo has some very nice developer resources. But this is one area where Google substantially outshines Yahoo. Send a short email to the above address and ask to get access to the Yahoo ad API. Seriously. Just send a one-liner. Take a moment to read through the canned response you get back. And then ask yourself "Why don't they just put all that info on a web page somewhere out in the open?" That you even have to email someone to begin with is odd (and annoying). What is Yahoo hiding? Why are they being so cagey?
Compare that email response to the AdWords API page at Google. Now step back and take in the Yahoo ads API page (and, I suppose the one other page regarding their API). Add in the email repsonse. Now take in all the info on Google's API. Notice a difference? Just a small one, maybe?
There's just no comparison whatsoever. Google is open, free and easy with their ads/cost data sharing. Yahoo is, to be kind, not so much any of those things.
Anyway, even if you DID manage to get API access, you better not hang your hat on that since access could get pulled for any number of spurious reasons. Take a look here for an interesting read. Yeesh.
Yahoo itself might have a decent suite of APIs, but such notions haven't as yet affected the folks who came over from Overture.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
...can't access a number of Yahoo! pages (nearly anything apart from their search page) due to a browswer restriction on Yahoo's end. I wonder if this extends to their other material.