back to article Yahoo! YUI! project! is! no! more!

Yahoo! has announced that its Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) project is redundant in the age of node.js and better browsers. The library has been a project in the Purple Palace since 2005, the web giant says, and has been out in public since 2006. While some of its techniques – its modules and dynamic loading, for example – …

  1. as2003

    What has node.js got to do with the demise of YUI? They serve entirely different purposes.

    1. Mario Becroft
      Meh

      Node.js has nothing to do with it, really. It's just a sign of the times--Javascript maturing and becoming an increasingly stable platform across client and server. One of the reasons JS libraries such as YUI were once needed was to paper over incompatibilities and deficiencies in different web browsers. Now that's no longer a concern, and the underlying HTML and Javascript platform is itself much more capable than before.

      YUI had a lot more to offer than just browser compatibility though; it was a widget toolkit, data interface layer and much more. It will be interesting to see how things play out over the next few years in web app toolkits replacing this functionality.

      The current trend is away from expansive, vertically integrated libraries like YUI toward simpler and more agile single-purpose libraries. On the flip side, web developers now face the tyranny of choice.

      Neither position is right or wrong. Maybe one or two stacks will become popular akin to LAMP's position on the server side, or maybe there will be web development distros managed much like Linux distros, curating the many packages in a form accessible to non-experts in the field. Perhaps there will always be a niche for remaining 'full stack' toolkits such as Dojo or a renewed YUI4, that provide a single, integrated environment rather as Java EE does on the server.

      One thing is certain, it's an interesting time to be a web developer.

  2. cyclical

    We made the mistake of picking up YUI2 back in the day as the main user interface for various projects; it was Yahoo and backed by a genuine company and looked pretty good compared to the open source competition at the time. Terrible mistake, YUI2 was a horrible library, migration to YUI3 was a pain (and wasn't much better). Regretted it ever since. The very last major project in YUI2 is currently being migrated to jQueryUI (after hobbling along patching the ancient code), and hopefully that will be it for a few more years.

  3. i1ya

    YUI is not particularly bad, but probably lack of popularity killed it

    I'm quite familar with YUI2. It has two very distinctive advantages over different frameworks: it is exhaustively documented with nice examples (and had quite useful API docs), and also it's API remains friendly to the application after you have instatiated your objects. All created widgets remain controllable from Javascript at very fine degree (not just receiving input from users and changing some hidden fields in the form.) Of course it had more steep learning curve and required some knoweledge of an object' lifecycle than with cut-and-paste jQuerish approach. What raised most questions is that some widgets where just incomplete and never became complete enough (as with Calendar or RTE editor). Why "rich editor" had to be re-inventend when there are enough more than mature solutions on the net? And also instead of improving YUI2 and making it complete, they decided to build YUI3 from scratch (which shared almost nothing with YUI2). I checked YUI3 from time to time and it progressed very, very slow - propably because the library was both gigantic, ambitous and not able to receive any hype. And still being ill with same "not invented here" dicease (why, for example, they were needed to re-create Canvas or charts?)

    Let's hope that people will still bring some patches and fixes from time to time. At least it is an open source and project will not die completely when the funding stops.

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