Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog)

YUI Theater Comes to Boxee, Courtesy of Chad Auld and the Brilaps Team

YUI contributor and former Yahoo Chad Auld emailed us to tell us about his latest project with his Brilaps group — a project that has brought YUI Theater to the TV screen via Boxee. In Chad’s words:

Boxee is an up-and-coming cross platform application that aims to help bring web content to the TV. It is based on the open source XBMC project and allows users to write new plugins to bring in additional content. We launched a new project about three weeks ago to build our first Boxee plugin, and we selected the YUI Theater as the content we wanted to bring from the web to the TV. There are so many great videos archived there (and growing), we think it is a terrific source of content for developers to have access to from their couch (especially since most of the videos are a bit longer than someone might have time to watch comfortably from their laptop). It took us about a week to build the plugin, another week to polish it up and sort out a few bugs, and about a week to get the application approved by the Boxee QA team and pushed into the public repository. I just got word that it hit the public repository this morning and so I wanted to reach out and let you know.

This is fantastic news for anyone who has been enjoying YUI Theater content and would like to catch up on the latest from Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich and all the other great YUI Theater speakers from the comfort of his/her couch. Check out the video above for a tour of the UI, and then go grab Boxee and get started.

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YUI Theater — Ryan Dahl: “Introduction to NodeJS” (58 min.)

Two weeks ago, Yahoo! hosted a BayJax meetup dedicated to NodeJS (since the meetup coincided with Cinco de Mayo, we named it ‘Cinco de Node’). Ryan Dahl, the creator of NodeJS, gave a talk on the project and was very kind to let us record his presentation for YUI Theater.

P.S. The video opens with a 30-second glimpse into the Cinco the Mayo celebrations at Yahoo!

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Download HD video (480p ~767MB)
• Download video (m4v)

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Elijah Insua: jsdom: a CommonJS Implementation of the DOM — Elijah Insua introduces a server-side implementation of the JavaScript DOM at the May 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
• Nicholas Zakas, Stoyan Stefanov, Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Matt Sweeney: High Performance JavaScript — Five contributors to O’Reilly’s High Performance JavaScript discuss advanced JavaScript and DOM scripting optimizations at the April 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
• Douglas Crockford: The State and Future of JavaScript — Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford discusses the recent ECMA5 development process and efforts to improve the language in the future.
• Dav Glass: Contributing to YUI — YUI engineer Dav Glass introduces you to the YUI Gallery and steps through the process of making contributions to the YUI project.

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YUI Theater — Elijah Insua: “jsdom: a CommonJS Implementation of the DOM” (18 min.)

Elijah Insua, a star developer from Arc90, presented his work on jsdom at the Cinco de Node BayJax event at Yahoo!. Elijah was presenting from Brooklyn via Skype (so please forgive the less-than-ideal video and audio quality), and graciously allowed us to capture his talk for YUI Theater.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Download HD video (480p ~243MB)
• Download video (m4v)

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Ryan Dahl: Introduction to NodeJS — Ryan Dahl, the creator of NodeJS, introduces the project and talks about performance improvements and new architecture. The talk took place at the May 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
• Nicholas Zakas, Stoyan Stefanov, Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Matt Sweeney: High Performance JavaScript — Five contributors to O’Reilly’s High Performance JavaScript discuss advanced JavaScript and DOM scripting optimizations at the April 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
• Christian Heilmann: YQL and YUI: Building Blocks for Quick Applications — The Yahoo! Developer Network’s international evangelist Christian Heilmann discusses his philosophy for creating fast, powerful, compelling applications using the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) and the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI).
• Luke Smith: Events Evolved — YUI engineer Luke Smith provides a deep introduction to the YUI 3 event system including its support for DOM events, event delegation, synthetic events, and custom events.

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YUI Theater — Adam Granicz: “Robust and Rapid Web Development with WebSharper” (57 min.)

Adam Granicz stopped by Yahoo! earlier this week to talk about the F# programming language and its use in web application development.

Granicz’s company, Intellifactory, produces the WebSharper platform. WebSharper fills the role in the F# community that GWT and similar tools fill in the Java community, promising a strongly typed, fast, tightly integrated development experience with deployment to rich web applications. As Fybit’s Riatrax4JS and yui4java do for Java developers, WebSharper brings the power of YUI 2 to F# developers, making a wide range of YUI widgets available.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Download HD video (480p ~572MB)
• Download video (m4v)

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Nicholas Zakas, Stoyan Stefanov, Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Matt Sweeney: High Performance JavaScript — Five contributors to O’Reilly’s High Performance JavaScript discuss advanced JavaScript and DOM scripting optimizations at the April 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Part 5: The End of All Things — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford concludes his five-part lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a review of issues related to security and performance in JavaScript.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with an analysis of the Document Object Model (DOM) and an exploration of Ajax.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Act III: Function the Ultimate — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a discussion of functions in JavaScript. ‘Functions are the very best part of JavaScript,’ Crockford says. ‘It’s where the power is, it’s where the beauty is.’ Watch the video to learn why.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford surveys the features of the JavaScript programming language.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years — Douglas Crockford puts the JavaScript programming language in its proper historical context, tracing the language’s structure and conventions (and some of its quirks) back to their roots in the early decades of computer science.

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

• YUI Theater RSS feed
• YUI Theater on iTunes

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YUI Theater — Nicholas Zakas, Stoyan Stefanov, Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Matt Sweeney: “High Performance JavaScript” (92 min.)

The April 2010 edition of the BayJax meetup at Yahoo! featured five speakers, all of whom are co-authors on the new High Performance JavaScript volume from O’Reilly (free chapter available here). There were about 200 attendees filling the URLs Cafe in the heart of Yahoo!, and they heard five distinctly interesting takes on web-app performance.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Download HD video (480p ~572MB)
• Download video (m4v)

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Part 5: The End of All Things — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford concludes his five-part lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a review of issues related to security and performance in JavaScript.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with an analysis of the Document Object Model (DOM) and an exploration of Ajax.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Act III: Function the Ultimate — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a discussion of functions in JavaScript. ‘Functions are the very best part of JavaScript,’ Crockford says. ‘It’s where the power is, it’s where the beauty is.’ Watch the video to learn why.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford surveys the features of the JavaScript programming language.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years — Douglas Crockford puts the JavaScript programming language in its proper historical context, tracing the language’s structure and conventions (and some of its quirks) back to their roots in the early decades of computer science.

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

• YUI Theater RSS feed
• YUI Theater on iTunes

[Photos by Nicole Sullivan; used by kind permission.]

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YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: “Crockford on JavaScript — Part 5: The End of All Things” (94 min.)

The final installment of the Crockford on JavaScript lecture series begins like this:

I believe that children are our future. And also, I believe, robots. Children and robots…

He turns quickly to issues of security in the browser:

The worst of all of its security problems is the so called cross site scripting attack, or XSS. It’s not called CSS because that would be confused with the Crappy Style Sheets system that’s in the browser. It really shouldn’t be called cross site scripting either, because there are modes of this attack which have nothing to do with operating across sites. You can have one of these attacks happening within a site. What it really is is a confusion of interest attack. One thing that’s unfortunate is that the security experts who identified and named it got it wrong, and have not corrected it since then, and expect all the web practitioners to be adopting their broken jargon. We’re going to talk a lot about these classes of problems, and how we’re going to fix them.

All of the Crockford on JavaScript videos are now up on YUI Theater:

• Volume One: The Early Years
• Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript
• Act III: Function the Ultimate
• Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax
• Part 5: The End of All Things

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Download HD video (480p ~705MB)
• Download video (m4v)
• Download slides
• A high-resolution, transcripted version of this talk is available on the YUI Theater site

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Christian Heilmann: YQL and YUI: Building Blocks for Quick Applications — The Yahoo! Developer Network’s international evangelist Christian Heilmann discusses his philosophy for creating fast, powerful, compelling applications using the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) and the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI).
• Philippe Le Hégaret: The Next Open Web Platform — Philippe Le Hégaret, who heads the W3C Interaction Domain, discusses HTML5. While the HTML5 specification itself does actually not contain many new features, the new Web platform, often labeled as HTML5, does come with many new features from HTML video to SVG to CSS animations or Web sockets. This talk gives an overview of what’s ahead of us, using concrete demonstrations in latest generation Web browsers.
• John Resig: Testing, Performance Analysis, and jQuery 1.4 — John Resig of Mozilla, creator of the popular jQuery JavaScript library, reviews options for testing and performance analysis in JavaScript and previews the significant changes coming soon in jQuery 1.4.
• Luke Smith: Events Evolved — YUI engineer Luke Smith provides a deep introduction to the YUI 3 event system including its support for DOM events, event delegation, synthetic events, and custom events.

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

• YUI Theater RSS feed
• YUI Theater on iTunes

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YUI Theater — Douglas Crockford: “Crockford on JavaScript — Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax” (93 min.)

Last week, Yahoo! JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford delivered the fourth installment of his Crockford on JavaScript series:

1. Volume One: The Early Years
2. Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript
3. Act III: Function the Ultimate
4. Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax
5. Part V: The End of All Things (March 31 — RSVP)

In this session, Douglas tackles the DOM. On the one hand there was JavaScript, he says, and JavaScript is “what made the browser work.”

On the other hand, there was the Document Object Model, also known affectionately as the DOM. It is what most people hate when they say they hate JavaScript. Most of the people who say they hate JavaScript don’t know JavaScript, might have never seen JavaScript, but they’ve felt the DOM alright. If you don’t know what the difference is and you say, “JavaScript is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” you’re not talking about JavaScript, you’re talking about the DOM. The DOM is the browser’s API. It is the interface. It provides JavaScript for manipulating documents.

The DOM may be imperfect, but it’s nonetheless crucial to what frontend engineers do when they write web applications. In this talk, Douglas provides an overview, situated historically, of where the DOM came from, how it achieved ascendance with Ajax, and what the future might hold. In Douglas’s inimitable fashion, this history starts with Sir John Harrington and takes us up to the present day. A few choice words for CSS are among the many applause lines for veteran developers:

I find within the community of people who use CSS great affection for it. They’re totally invested in CSS, they love it. They can’t imagine any other way of doing formatting in a document. It’s it. It’s sort of like watching an episode of Cops where the cops come in and break up the family dispute, and there’s this “CSS ain’t bad, you just don’t understand it like I do. I know it hurts me, but I make mistakes, I’m wrong.” CSS is awful, and it amazes me the way people get invested in it. It’s like once you figure it out, kind of go “oh, OK, I see how I might be able to make it work,” then you flip from hating it to loving it, and despising anybody who hasn’t gone through what you’ve gone through. It doesn’t make sense to me.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Act III: Function the Ultimate — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a discussion of functions in JavaScript. ‘Functions are the very best part of JavaScript,’ Crockford says. ‘It’s where the power is, it’s where the beauty is.’ Watch the video to learn why.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford surveys the features of the JavaScript programming language.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years — Douglas Crockford puts the JavaScript programming language in its proper historical context, tracing the language’s structure and conventions (and some of its quirks) back to their roots in the early decades of computer science.
• Christian Heilmann: YQL and YUI: Building Blocks for Quick Applications — The Yahoo! Developer Network’s international evangelist Christian Heilmann discusses his philosophy for creating fast, powerful, compelling applications using the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) and the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI).

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

• YUI Theater RSS feed
• YUI Theater on iTunes

Find conversations: bloglines | technorati

Share and extend: Bookmark with del.icio.us | digg it! | reddit!