YUI 3.0.0 beta 1 Available for Download

June 24, 2009 at 2:35 pm by Eric Miraglia | In Development | 19 Comments

YUI 3.0.0 beta 1 is now available for download from YUILibrary.com.

This release takes YUI 3 out of its preview phase and brings its APIs to a near-final state. For those intending to implement YUI 3, the 3.0.0 beta 1 release is a good place to begin the transition. If you’ve been working with the latest preview release, George Puckett has provided a comprehensive 3.0.0 beta 1 changelog to guide you. We look forward to hearing your feedback as you begin working with 3.0.0 beta 1, and we’ll work hard to address that feedback as we prepare for a GA release in the coming months.

We’ve spent a lot of time in this release cycle refining the core elements of YUI 3 — YUI, Node, and Event — to ensure that we have the right API going forward. Performance is improved, and we’ve refined our module/submodule structure. In some cases we’ve added significant new features, including intrinsic support for event delegation in the Event package; however, the focus is on moving the base library to production quality.

Several YUI 2.x components make their YUI 3 debut in this release:

DataSource: YUI’s data abstraction layer provides a standard interface into data sets, regardless of the data’s origin (local, XHR, XSS, etc.) and format (JSON, XML, CSV, etc.);
ImageLoader: ImageLoader allows you to defer the loading of images that aren’t in the viewport when the page paints, throttling bandwidth usage and improving performance;
History: The History component gives you control of the brower’s back button within the context of a single-page web application;
StyleSheet: StyleSheet makes it easy to create and modify CSS rules on the fly, allowing you to dynamically style page elements with fewer repaints.

As part of the more granular packaging in the new codeline, we’ve created separate YUI 3 modules to house functionality that in YUI 2 was bundled with other components. Cache, DataType and DataSchema debut in this release; each of these used to be a part of DataSource.

Getting to Know YUI 3

The best way to get started with YUI 3 is to dive into the documentation and examples — particularly the examples for the core YUI, Node and Event components.

We also recommend spending some time with Satyen Desai, whose tech talk on YUI 3’s design goals and architecture provides an excellent overview of the new codeline. The video is embedded below; an HD version, along with a transcript, is available from the YUI Theater site.

Satyen Desai: "YUI 3: Design Goals and Architecture" @ Yahoo! Video

CSS Grids and YUI 3

Those of you who use the YUI CSS components may notice that we’ve removed references to YUI CSS Grids in the 3.0.0 beta 1 documentation, although Grids remains present in the download (and, of course, you can continue using the YUI 2.7.0 version of Grids).

We’ve deprecated the Grids implementation that was included in the preview releases, and we expect to significantly re-engineer this component before reintroducing it as part of YUI 3.

Roadmap

The 3.0.0 beta 1 release is an important milestone for YUI. At this point, we are encouraging all YUI implementers to use YUI 3 for new projects, especially projects that don’t make heavy use of widgets.

Our attention now turns to bringing YUI 3 to GA status. We expect this to happen in Q3, at which time the following components will be promoted to GA:

Core: YUI, Node, Event
Component foundation: Attribute, Base, Plugin
Utilities: Animation, Cookie, Drag and Drop, Get, History, ImageLoader, IO, JSON, Queue, StyleSheet
CSS: Reset, Base, Fonts

After 3.0.0 GA, the next major release will be 3.1.0, currently scheduled for Q4. The 3.1.0 release will bring the widget foundation to GA, including the following components:

Widget foundation: Widget and Widget extensions
Utilities: DataSource, DataSchema, DataType, Cache

During the 3.1.0 release cycle, we’ll also begin introducing specific widgets built upon the YUI 3 codeline. Note that Widget, its extensions, and the sample widgets shipping with 3.0.0 beta 1 are expected to evolve significantly in the coming months as we begin focusing more attention on that part of the library.

For full details on the roadmap, refer to the YUI 3.x Roadmap on YUILibrary.com. That page is kept current with the latest information about our plans and progress. The YUI 3.x Dashboard is also a useful resource for those wanting to track our progress toward major YUI 3 releases.

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19 Comments »

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Exciting news, i’m looking forward to playing with it.

Comment by Micke — June 24, 2009 #
Been looking forward to this. Thanks!

Comment by Mundi Morgado — June 24, 2009 #
Congrats on the release guys! Great work!

Comment by Ara Pehlivanian — June 24, 2009 #
[...] YUI 3.0.0 beta 1 Available for Download YUI 3.0.0 beta 1 is now available for download from YUILibrary.com. [...]

Pingback by YUI 3.0.0 beta 1 Available for Download » HTML + CSS + JavaScript » Blog Archive — June 24, 2009 #
Thanks for the YUI team!

Comment by Mingfai — June 24, 2009 #
Congrats!

Are there already plans bringing RTE to 3.x?

Comment by Stefan Isak — June 25, 2009 #
This looks outstanding. Congratulations!

Comment by Nate Koechley — June 25, 2009 #
First of all – congratulations guys, your work is adorable!

Second..

In my opinion the best thing that could happen to YUI would be really nice skin for widgets (of Ext JS or better quality) – that would make YUI terribly great tool for rapid applications development – so we could create very good looking prototypes to demo our apps, to start with, or even settle with the defaults later on. This is in my opinion only possible with Ext JS these days (and with advent of Ext JS 3.0 the choice is even more obvious).

YUI in theory has significant advantages over Ext JS (although in practice Ext JS is very nice to work with for complex desktop-like applications, and I don’t really know about YUI) and I would really like to switch, but for me (and I bet that I’m not the only one) skins are the show stopper.

So, what are the plans regarding YUI3 default skin?

Comment by Kamil T. — June 25, 2009 #
Awesome work guys. Can’t wait to play with some new toys.

@Kamil T. what about YUI’s sam skin? YUI has had default stylings for a long time, just refer to the examples.

Comment by Dylan Oudyk — June 25, 2009 #
Yes, of course Dylan, Sam skin is nice, clean and very well designed (from usability standpoint) – it’s just that it doesn’t appeal to people like Ext JS skin does – non developers I’m talking about.

And maybe I was to quick to judge, because I also feel that Sam is great for regular websites – very susceptible to small customizations, accessible and optimized (and neither is true for Ext JS), but still… it doesn’t have this wow effect that’s so useful when developing a prototype / demo app. In my opinion non technical people (not only) tend to think: simple skin (like Sam) => simple application; attractive/eye-catching, so different than websites out there skin => advanced application.

And don’t get me wrong – I still believe in “less is more”, KISS and stuff, but “attractive/eye-catching” doesn’t necessary equal to bloated (especially Ext JS skin is not bloated imo (although generated DOM tree is)).

Don’t you think?

Comment by Kamil T. — June 25, 2009 #
Yes, great stuff!

On the topic of skins, I agree with Kamil. The Sam skin is good to get started, but for commercial projects, more wow is required. However, may I suggest some kind of skin configuration tool, or at least better documentation for the skin and the files. After all, even if YUI came with a Wow-skin (!), in all likelihood one would want to modify the skin such as adapt to the client’s corporate design etc. In a RAD scenario, fumbling with the Sam CSS files (or a future Wow…) is a bit of a pain for developers who are not HTML wizards.

That’s my 2 cents…

Comment by Morad — June 25, 2009 #
@Stefan, yes I will be porting Editor to YUI 3 eventually, but there are other things the library needs to have before I can have a full widget.

Comment by Dav Glass — June 25, 2009 #
[...] big news from the YUI team last week was the release of YUI 3.0.0 beta 1, moving YUI 3 one important step closer to GA. What follows is some of the other news coming from [...]

Pingback by In the Wild for June 29, 2009 » Yahoo! User Interface Blog — June 29, 2009 #
I’m assuming YUI2 and YUI3 can co-exist peacefully on the same page?

My apps tend to be fairly widget-heavy, using YUI widgets like TabView and Carousel extensively – when can we expect to see the bulk of YUI2 widgets ported over?

Thanks!

Comment by Josh L — June 29, 2009 #
@Josh –

The widget framework will go GA in 3.1.0, which should be out in Q4, and that’s when you’ll see widgets starting to appear in earnest. It will probably take two additional release cycles to get all of the most important widgets ported over, but we’ll go as fast as we can. See the project page for roadmap details:

http://yuilibrary.com/projects/yui3/roadmap
http://yuilibrary.com/projects/yui3/dashboard

-Eric

Comment by Eric Miraglia — June 30, 2009 #
@Josh,

I should have mentioned, also: Yes, YUI2 and YUI3 live happily together. Check out this example for more details:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/examples/yui/yui-compat.html

-Eric

Comment by Eric Miraglia — June 30, 2009 #
Hi Eric,

The project dashboard page at http://yuilibrary.com is very impressive. What project management system is the site built on?

Comment by Wei Tian — June 30, 2009 #
Wei,

We use Trac, but it’s a heavily customized version — and the dashboard is the result of a collaboration between our program manager George Puckett and YUILibrary.com’s lead developer, Dav Glass.

Dav has put this work up on his GitHub account, so you can download it and try it out of you’d like:

http://github.com/davglass

-Eric

Comment by Eric Miraglia — July 1, 2009 #
Thanks,I’m looking forward to 3.x!

Comment by Handy — July 24, 2009 #

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