Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

YUI London Meetup on October 16

If you’re in London, please join us for a YUI meetup on October 16 at 6:15 p.m. at the Yahoo! UK office on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Sophie Major and Christian Heilmann from the Yahoo Developer Network will be the hosts on the London side, and YUI engineers Matt Sweeney, Adam Moore and Satyen Desai will be participating by videoconference to give you a tour of (and progress report on) YUI’s upcoming 3.0 release.

Like meetups we had here in California last month, this event will be small and informal — it’s a good opportunity for us to get feedback from you on the 3.0 work, and likewise it’s a good chance for you to hear directly from some of the project’s principal developers. We hope to see you there.

After the YUI 3.x discussion via video conference, Christian and Sophie will be heading off to a local pub for more discussion and socializing.

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In the Wild for January 18

Here are some of the stories and happenings that have caught our eye since the last “In the Wild” post:

• YUI’s Nate Koechley on the TWiT Podcast: Over on the TWiT network’s “Free and Libre Open Source Software” (FLOSS) podcast, Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte had YUI’s Nate Koechley on as a guest to talk about YUI. It’s a great interview — astute questions and observations from the hosts, and of course Nate has been on the front lines talking about YUI since its inception.
  
• Final version of YUI-Based Lightbox on The Code Central: Cuong Tham’s Lightbox goes final; according to Cuong, “The most significant change in this version of the lightbox is that image thumbnails are no longer required for creating lightbox instance. That implies that you can create an image gallery without the presence of image thumbnails. The more exciting aspect of this new feature is that you can virtually grab any image from the internet and include it in your gallery.” Lots of positive feedback on his blog, where you’ll find download links and demo pages.
• YUI-based Loading Panel Widget: Cuong pours it on with another YUI adaptation, in this case a Loading Panel Widget. As always, he has it fully documented with all the code you need to get started.
  
• vBulletin 3.7 adds further YUI integration: If you’re a vBulletin user, the 3.7 release from late last year brings in fuller YUI integration and adds the ability to switch between local and Yahoo-hosted YUI files. Letting Yahoo host your YUI files can save you bandwidth and improve performance, so it’s great to see the vBulletin team exposing that as a simple configuration.
• MIT Timelines Mashup: Yahoo engineer Wally Punsapy put together this exploration of a rich timeline mashup and it’s currently an Editor’s Pick in the YUI section of Yahoo! Gallery. It’s more of a concept piece than a finished app, but it’s suggestive of the new breed of interactives that are maturing around APIs from companies like Flickr, Blogger, Youtube, Yahoo, Google and others.
• YUI CSS on Rails: John Munsch makes the case that Rails’ tight integration with Prototype is no reason not to use YUI CSS on your Rails app.
• Review of AutoComplete Widgets: I’ve long argued that AutoComplete is one of the most important client-side interactions to support in a JavaScript CSS library, so I was excited to see this article on Developer.com covering the implementation of AutoComplete in several libraries (including YUI). To ramp up on the YUI implementation, check out Jenny Han Donnelly’s User’s Guide and examples for YUI AutoComplete.
• Simple “show/hide” toggle with YUI: Lustr.nl has a nice codesnippet for a YUI-based show/hide toggle. From their post, “Within applications / websites you want to show and hide elements based on mouse clicks. Instead of defining each ‘toggle’ seperately you can use this toggle function. By adding a ‘rel’ attribute to a link you can define a toggle action. This toggle function also offers animation as an extra.”
• Qollage.com beta released: Online collage-creation site Qollage.com opened up a beta recently and there are numerous sample collages to explore. Qollage takes an aggressive approach to using rich interactions, with a dozen different YUI components included on the page.
  
• Notes on using onDOMReady: Michael James offers some useful notes about the use of onDOMReady (implemented in YUI and elsewhere) — and especially about some things to think about when use of onDOMReady fails at first blush to protect you from the dreaded “operation aborted” error in IE. (If you’re not familiar with onDOMReady, the tutorial text on this onDOMReady example might be of interest.)

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Free Hosting of YUI Files from Yahoo!

Coinciding with this week’s release of YUI version 2.2.0, the one year anniversary of the YUI open-source release, and as announced at the YUI Party just moments ago, we’re opening up free YUI hosting from the Yahoo! network to all YUI implementers. If you’re using YUI for your own project, we’ll serve the files for you — gzipped, with good cache-control, using our state-of-the-art network, for free. You can count on these files being continuously available because they’re the same files, served by the same source, that we use for most YUI implementations at Yahoo!.

Files served from Yahoo!’s network include version numbers in filepaths, allowing you to reference a specific version in your code. Previous versions are retained even as new versions are released. While we are providing no explicit SLA with respect to the availability of legacy code, our current policy is to support permanent availability of legacy YUI files.

Why Provide YUI Hosting on Yahoo!’s Network?

We’re opening up the service of YUI from Yahoo! servers for the same reasons we open-sourced YUI in February: Yahoo! is quintessentially a web company. The progress being made by developers in richness and usability today is healthy for the web and, by extension, good for Yahoo! We want to do everything we can do to enhance that evolution — whether it’s opening up YUI, hosting YUI files, or creating best-of-breed APIs like the recently-announced Browser-Based Authentication system.

At the end of the day, this step has a small incremental cost to Yahoo! while providing a valuable ease-of-implementation advantage to many developers. Serving YUI from Yahoo! servers won’t be the right decision for all implementers; if you’re aggregating or customizing YUI source code and serving it from a highly performant host, there will be little reason to switch. However, for some implementers the provision of free, robust, edge-network hosting will have significant upside.

What Are the Benefits of Having Yahoo! Host YUI Files?

Yahoo!’s network is located throughout the world. HTTP requests for YUI files are evaluated to determine their geographic source and then served from in-region server farms wherever possible. This edge-computing system provides shorter round-trip times for packets as compared to the use of centralized network hosts. Because YUI files (consisting of JavaScript files, CSS files, and image resources) are static, there need be no relationship between the server providing these files and the server holding session information and business logic for a given application. Moving these files off a central server and closer to your users, therefore, should make your application more responsive overall.

Moreover, Yahoo!’s hosting network is configured to serve JavaScript and CSS using gzip compression. We minify YUI JavaScript before pushing it to our servers; in combination with gzipping, this results in a 90% reduction in transmitted filesize as compared to the footprint of YUI’s raw (and commented) source. CSS files weigh 60% less on the wire using gzip compression. If your current host does not support mod-gzip or mod-deflate, the advantages of using Yahoo! hosting could be dramatic. (See "YUI: Weighing in on Pageweights" for a full discussion of YUI filesizes.)

Finally, far-future Expires headers are issued on all static content. This HTTP response header directs the browser to retain content in cache (and to access it from the cache) as long as possible. Improving your cache hit rate will reduce the amount of time your users spend waiting for files to download.

What About Privacy?

Usage of this service will be recorded in Yahoo!’s Web traffic logs. We can assure you that our intent is simply to provide a convenience to the YUI developer community. If the record left in Yahoo!’s logs would compromise the privacy of your users, do not use this service.

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For complete information about how to include YUI files hosted by Yahoo! in your project, please see "Serving YUI from Yahoo!" on the YUI website. We hope this resource proves useful to those of you developing rich internet applications with YUI.

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