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."

Comments

Yahoo is the new Google?

[Teetow]

So, while Google is expanding its new evil empire, Yahoo is courting indie developers? Strange days on planet earth...

Re:Yahoo is the new Google?

[m50d]

Yahoo has always been like this, it's just people didn't notice while google was the new hotness. Seriously, they seem to be doing the Right Thing, and it's about time they got some recognition.

Re:Yahoo is the new Google?

[stupidfoo]

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.

Really good stuff

[Vivek Jishtu]

I tried out some of the JavaScript code they are offering. It is a nice library of functions for web application development.

show me the money

[Douglas Simmons]

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?

Re:show me the money

[generic-man]

Because they want to improve their image in the open source community, making people think better of Yahoo! when it comes time to choose between Yahoo!, Google, and Brand X for their next enterprise service purchase. I also imagine that they could release code in the future that makes it easy to incorporate Yahoo!'s ad technology so that Web 2.0 developers can contextually-advertise and make money from their efforts.

Google's acts of "driving people to its site" do nothing for Google's bottom line. Google, like Yahoo!, is an advertising company which makes the vast majority of its income from other web sites besides their search engines / portals.

Very nice - great little library

[us7892]

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.

Yahoo UIL and Google Code pages

[digitaldc]

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

BSD license

[Rob T Firefly]

Yahoo are releasing this stuff under the BSD License.

Re:BSD license

[Otter]

It's a trick to avoid complaints from Richard Stallman -- this way he won't know what to denounce first, and he'll simply emit smoke.

Re:I for one find that...

[zenquest]

BSD License: http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/license.txt

Nice Accessibility

[aliens]

If you look through their Design Patterns you'll see that each has an Accessibility section. Very nice addition and often over looked.

Re:I for one find that...

[AKAImBatman]

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. :-)

Prototype still rocks

[esconsult1]

After using prototype.js for a while now, its hard to switch to a fatter library which is what the Yahoo library seems like. Each one has their good points, and pieces missing, but I think if you decide to use either, you can't go wrong.

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.

"Library", are you kidding me?

[rtilghman]

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

Re:"Library", are you kidding me?

[AKAImBatman]

"Library", are you kidding me?

Indeed. Most of the posters obviously didn't do much investigation, or are not that familiar with AJAX development. This is the same stuff you've been able to get elsewhere for a LONG time. The Blueshoes and ActiveWidget collections are a lot more useful, albeit not entirely free.

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.

It's because the market is still young. For right now there's money to be made in DHTML controls. As long as that's true, programmers aren't going to be giving stuff away. (Hell, I've got my stash of super-secret components, and I'm willing to bet that you do too.) Once components become more commonplace, OSS libraries will begin appearing.

Re:"Library", are you kidding me?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Please don't use the drag and drop

[slashkitty]

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.

this is not a widget library

[Gopal.V]

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.

Comments interesting and appreciated...

[ursabear]

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.