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Yahoo Stops New Development On YUI

First time accepted submitter dnebin writes Yahoo announced that they will cease new development on their javascript framework YUI, bowing to industry trends towards Node.js, Angular, and others. The announcement reads in part: "The consequence of this evolution in web technologies is that large JavaScript libraries, such as YUI, have been receiving less attention from the community. Many developers today look at large JavaScript libraries as walled gardens they don't want to be locked into. As a result, the number of YUI issues and pull requests we've received in the past couple of years has slowly reduced to a trickle. Most core YUI modules do not have active maintainers, relying instead on a slow stream of occasional patches from external contributors. Few reviewers still have the time to ensure that the patches submitted are reviewed quickly and thoroughly."

47 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From the featured article:

    Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards.

    I'm curious how long Microsoft will continue improving Internet Explorer for Windows 7. Microsoft has historically ended development of new IE features once a particular version of Windows goes into extended support. This means Windows Vista is stuck on IE 9, and unless IE 12 comes out before January 2015, Windows 7 will be stuck on IE 11. In any case, even IE 9 supports enough of the W3C DOM that you might not need jQuery or any other monolithic framework in your site's JavaScript. People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

    1. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Charliemopps · · Score: 1

      People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

      Which is exactly why Microsoft does that, and why you should never build software that's dependent on closed source products. At best you're at the whim of the owner, and they may abandon you. At worst, they will see their position as leverage to force you into ever more expensive software contracts. Which is exactly what Microsoft does.

    2. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      You should be using Chrome anyway.

      Yep - Google needs to know all my browsing history

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    3. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I really wish developers wouldn't use YUI or jQuery for things the web browser is more than capable of doing itself. As the entire obamacare site fiasco has shown, jQuery is just a bad idea in the hands of people who don't know when to use frameworks.

      When to use a framework:
      a) Never, as the default.
      b) When you need functionality wrapping in a non-user-facing part of a site, eg administrative controls, where the version of the framework can be frozen
      c) When the amount of javascript that needs to be written can be reduced by a factor of 100.

      Most sites, load up the huge ass javascript framework than then use maybe two functions from it, things that are already thin enough and present in the browser (eg css transitions.) The "lightbox" effect that so many picture galleries use is actually LESS code to do by hand than to do with jQuery.

    4. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2

      The sooner that pile of garbage, AKA YUI, dies, the better. Pulling the plug will only make it go away faster, and faster is definitely better in this case. This will be the first time I cheer something related to YUI.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    5. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by tepples · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I really wish developers wouldn't use YUI or jQuery for things the web browser is more than capable of doing itself.

      The whole reason for things like jQuery is that under old IE, the web browser wasn't capable of doing a lot of these things itself. If you go to the You Might Not Need jQuery site and set the compatibility slider to IE 8, for example, a couple solutions end up as "just use jQuery". Not needing massive workarounds for deficiencies in the latest version of the included web browser on a still-supported PC operating system is a relatively new concept. Five months ago, a Windows operating system that couldn't be upgraded past IE 8 was still in extended support.

    6. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by smittyoneeach · · Score: 1

      Broadening your point, jQuery does a fine job of harmonizing all of the bits of personality across vendors and versions. Buy all means, hack that javascript down by a factor of 100. . .but be sure to bulk up on testers and maintenance people to help you re-invent jQuery's host of fix-ups.
      Not that any of that helped HealthCare.gov. I guess jQuery hasn't implemented polishLegislativeTurd() yet.

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    7. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Camael · · Score: 1

      People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

      Or, they could just stick with the browser and OS that they currently own.

      I suspect that most people who can't give up IE fall into 2 broad categories, namely those who need it for work to access some legacy corporate website and those who use IE for convenience because it came with their OS by default.

      Neither of these categories need the best and the brightest, and are thus likely to stick with the status quo (i.e. whatever works) unless forced to change. And when forced to change, they are probably going to rely on others to sort it out for them, whether it is their corporate IT department or their computer literate friends/family. In any case, expending cash on a new user unfriendly OS just to keep a browser's functionality is likely a less popular option than upgrading to one of the many free modern browsers available.

    8. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by narcc · · Score: 2

      .but be sure to bulk up on testers and maintenance people to help you re-invent jQuery's host of fix-ups.

      You know that that's a long debunked myth, right?

      jQuery was never good at "harmonizing all of the bits of personality across vendors and versions". It even introduced it's own long list of browser incompatibilities. Remember the IE8 fiasco? That was all due to the grossly incompetent design of jQuery. It's all on c.l.j, if you're willing to do a bit of digging.

      I banned it ages ago, for technical reasons. I can't even begin to predict how many thousands of hours we've saved as a result.

    9. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by smittyoneeach · · Score: 1

      It's all on c.l.j, if you're willing to do a bit of digging.

      I daresay if there was any substance to your point (and I've read the jQuery source at some depth around the 1.7 era) then you'd've proffered a URL to go with your FUD, no?

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
    10. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by narcc · · Score: 1

      You quoted it. There's years worth of analysis there.

    11. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Paradigma11 · · Score: 2

      I am using IE for the first time now because i got a 4K screen and IE does a much better job at font rendering than chrome at that resolution.

      Most likely firefox would be similar since it also uses Direct2d and DirectWrite but IE is ok for now.

    12. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Wootery · · Score: 1

      Fairly sure Chrome doesn't phone-home these details to Google. Maybe it does if you 'sign-in in Chrome', but I never saw the point in that.

    13. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      Or those that want to use group policy to control what users can do with the browser which IE does better than all the other browsers unsurprisingly.

    14. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by terjeber · · Score: 1

      how long Microsoft will continue improving Internet Explorer for Windows 7

      For as long as Google will continue to update Chrome version 7. Why do you ask?

    15. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by terjeber · · Score: 1

      Corporate apps and products coming out TODAY require IE 8 and MS specific hacks just to run

      Then the people in your procurement division are morons. Why would they buy shit like that?

    16. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by bluec · · Score: 1

      I embraced it ages ago, for technical reasons. I can't even begin to predict how many thousands of hours we've saved as a result.

    17. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by CadentOrange · · Score: 1

      jQuery hardly qualifies as a "huge ass" javascript framework. The gzip minified production version of the script weighs in at under 34kB. Worst case scenario if you're hosting jQuery yourself, this is a one off download. This is hardly going to cause problems, even on a mobile data connection.

      On the other hand, jQuery does make code a lot neater. Especially with judicious use of selectors

      .

      p.s. Nice going trying to pin the Obamacare fiasco on jQuery. I don't think I've heard that one before.

    18. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by pete6677 · · Score: 1

      Who would you rather have know your browsing history? Google or Microsoft. No way IE doesn't have some secret phone home feature.

    19. Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by pete6677 · · Score: 1

      The fact that your company is a dinosaur is not anyone else's problem. Microsoft does not care about losing your "business", which would consist of upgrading away from Windows 7 in 2019.

    20. Re: Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      But all companies operate the same. Everything out there only works in old IE

  2. No mention of jQuery? by alphazulu0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm sure someone will point out that jQuery is more of a library and YUI more of a framework, but they solve many of the same problems and people don't usually use both. I imagine jQuery's popularity is one of the reasons for YUI's decline, but no mention of it in the announcement.

    az0

    1. Re:No mention of jQuery? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No jQuery, bootstrap, foundation or backbone... yet node.js? Me thinks either the submitter or editor does not know what node is.

    2. Re:No mention of jQuery? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And yet, you still didn't understand why they mentioned Node.js.

  3. Ya-who? by jenningsthecat · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    If I didn't maintain burner email accounts with them out of sheer inertia, they wouldn't even be on my radar.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  4. YUI YUI by wbr1 · · Score: 1

    A million deaths were not enough for YUI.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
    1. Re:YUI YUI by smittyoneeach · · Score: 1

      I really needed a song:
      "YUI-YUI
      oh, baby
      we gotta go. . ."

      --
      Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  5. Get your lingo right by lucm · · Score: 2

    If you maintain an email account, it's not a burner.

    --
    lucm, indeed.
  6. YUI vs. Node.js ? by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 2

    YUI and Node.js are juxtaposed here, whereas YUI (as far as I knew) was client-side and Node.js is server side javascript.
    Never used either (use PHP and pure Javascript), so the confusion may be mine.

    1. Re:YUI vs. Node.js ? by dnebin · · Score: 1

      They seem to think the decline of support behind YUI is somewhat based on node and other newer frameworks.

    2. Re:YUI vs. Node.js ? by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but why? That's a little like saying the decline in use of GTK is because Intel has a new C compiler out.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    3. Re:YUI vs. Node.js ? by narcc · · Score: 1

      By using two of the most popular languages in the world?

    4. Re:YUI vs. Node.js ? by volovski · · Score: 1

      I thought the same thing. How does a client side replace a server side. Are we going back to all thin clients.

    5. Re:YUI vs. Node.js ? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      If they are doing anything with any level of complexity, they are very arguably using one wrongly. There are a reason lots of libraries exist for JS - implementations vary across browsers, and the base language is lacking some rather useful low-level features. If they are writing "pure JavaScript" and doing anything remotely complex, then they either bridged the gap themselves (by recreating the wheel, most likely incompletely), or are simply not using them (limiting compatibility).

  7. Yahoo announced that they will cease new development on their javascript framework YUI, bowing to industry trends towards Node.js, Angular, and others.

    That's like when people used to talk vaguely about "talk radio" while somehow studiously omitting Rush L.

    Just querying, ya know ...

  8. I was a member of the YUI team... by clarle · · Score: 5, Interesting
    First posted on /r/javascript on Reddit, but I think it's worth posting here too:

    I was a member of the YUI team until a few months ago. I'm still at Yahoo now, just on a different team, but just wanted to give my own thoughts on this (I don't represent the company or the YUI team).

    My software engineering career started with the YUI team - I actually joined as an intern at Yahoo because of a Reddit post on /r/javascript. I was pretty new to engineering in general back then, and as a biology major with no real professional experience, I didn't have an easy time getting internships. Jenny, the manager of the YUI team back then, really took a chance on me, and that really changed my entire career path. I solved a bunch of YUI bugs, added a few features here or there, and I always tried to help other folks on #yui on IRC, the mailing list, or in-person here at Yahoo, which I really enjoyed. I learned a crazy amount of JavaScript, some pretty advanced debugging / performance profiling techniques, and even gave some talks. Eventually, a lot of people always came to me first whenever they had a question about YUI, which was pretty cool.

    From the view of some people in the JavaScript community, YUI was always considered a huge, monolithic framework that was only good for widgets. I never thought that was the case - YUI pioneered a lot of the techniques that are popular in advanced JavaScript development today, like modules, dynamic loading, and creating logical view separation in your code. A lot of the influence in RequireJS / CommonJS / ES6 modules can be seen from what YUI did first, which people used to consider "over-engineering".

    With a lot of new development in JavaScript though (data-binding, tooling like Grunt / Yeoman, promises and other async handling techniques), it was always hard for YUI to keep up with new features while still being able to maintain backwards compatibility with the constantly deploying products that people were building at Yahoo. We had to support product teams while also building out the framework at the same time, and making sure the user-facing products were the best was more important. Eventually, it was hard when developers who were familiar with newer JavaScript tools tried to use YUI, but ended up having to spend quite some time with the framework just to get it working with the rest of the JS ecosystem.

    In the end, I wasn't involved with this decision, but I think it was the right thing to do. A lot of the YUI (now YPT) team and other front-end teams at Yahoo are now working on helping out with more cutting-edge core JavaScript work, like internationalization and ES6 modules, as well as building out components for newer frameworks like React and Ember. Yahoo still has a lot of really strong front-end developers, and working on these more important core components is more beneficial to both Yahoo and the JS community as a whole, than continuing to maintain a framework that's a walled garden.

    The one thing to take away from this is that no technology lasts forever, and in the end, what the user sees is the most important, whether it's JavaScript, Android / iOS, or holographic smartwatches.

    I'll be a bit melancholy today, but I'll raise a glass to YUI tonight. Cheers to all the folks who worked on YUI, and everyone in the YUI community as well - I made a lot of friends there. RIP.

    1. Re:I was a member of the YUI team... by Daniel+Hoffmann · · Score: 1

      I use the YUI minifier on my projects, you know if they are discontinuing that too? It is more of an auxiliary tool than part of the framework itself right?

    2. Re:I was a member of the YUI team... by clarle · · Score: 1

      The YUI minifier is being maintained by a community member, but we at Yahoo actually use UglifyJS instead now.

      You can take a look at our configuration here: https://github.com/yahoo/yuglify

  9. Microsoft To Drop Support For Older Versions of IE by tepples · · Score: 1

    You better plan to support IE 8 until 2019

    Why, when Microsoft itself will stop issuing security updates for IE 8 in January 2016?

  10. Re:Read the article vs. the summary? by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 1

    You trusted the summary instead of reading the article. It's relatively brief, and it took me less than 10 seconds to roughly grasp the confusion.

    Node.js is a very tiny part of the whole explanation.

    Fuck it, you're not going to click so here's the relevant bits. I'm assuming Node.js injects script into the pages it creates, meaning those developers don't need script libraries (other than Node.js)

    The emergence of Node.JS has allowed JavaScript to be used on the server side, opening the door to creating isomorphic single page applications. New package managers (npm, bower) have spurred the rise of an ecosystem of 3rd party, open source, single-purpose tools that complement each other, embracing the UNIX philosophy and enabling very complex development use cases. New build tools (Grunt and its ecosystem of plugins, Broccoli, Gulp) have made it easier to assemble those tiny modules into large, cohesive applications. New application frameworks (Backbone, React, Ember, Polymer, Angular, etc.) have helped architect web applications in a more scalable and maintainable way. New testing tools (Mocha, Casper, Karma, etc.) have lowered the barrier of entry to building a solid continuous delivery pipeline. Standard bodies (W3C, Ecma) are standardizing what the large JavaScript frameworks have brought to the table over the years, making them available natively to a larger number of devices. Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards. With so called âoeevergreen web browsersâ, which are making it easier for users to run the latest stable version of a web browser, we can expect a significant reduction in the amount of variance across user agents.

  11. Says you by s.petry · · Score: 1

    Chrome is is just like IE for more operating systems, no thanks I won't touch the stuff. Rating things on a combination of user security and functionality, Opera is hard to beat with Firefox in a close 2nd. I don't care how fast Chrome can load pages, I don't sit and watch memes flash by all day.

    --

    -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    1. Re:Says you by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      In what way is it just like IE?

  12. Dr Yui by rossdee · · Score: 1

    Yeo, I thought he was the doctor that was the traitor in the Atreides camp because the Harkonnens had his wife hostage.

  13. Re:What does Yahoo! do? by FatLittleMonkey · · Score: 1

    What does Yahoo! do?

    In Soviet Russia, Yahoo does YUI.

    --
    Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
  14. Re:pussies by ArcadeMan · · Score: 1

    It must take forever to move all those zeros and ones around.

    I prefer to code my javascript entirely from a text editor.

  15. Last Year's Toys by kidphoton · · Score: 1

    Sounds to me like the kids are bored with last year's toys and have become envious of the cool kids' new toys. Strange, because overall the old toys are still more popular than the new toys.

  16. Fix groups! by Walter+White · · Score: 1

    Maybe they can turn their attention back to some of their existing code. I'm the owner of a Yahoo group that is receiving spam. There is a spam folder but not all of the emails are marked as spam. I can find no way to mark them as spam. Doh!