YUI Library

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is an open-source JavaScript library for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as Ajax, DHTML and DOM scripting. YUI includes several core CSS resources. It is available under a BSD License.^[1] Development on YUI began in 2005 and Yahoo! properties such as My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! front page began using YUI in the summer of that year. YUI was released for public use in February 2006.^[2] It is actively developed by a core team of Yahoo! engineers.

In September 2009, Yahoo! released YUI 3, a new version of YUI rebuilt from the ground up to modernize the library and incorporate lessons learned from YUI 2. Among the enhancements are a CSS selector driven engine for retrieving DOM elements, a greater emphasis on granularity of modules, a smaller seed file that loads other modules when necessary, and a variety of syntactic changes intended to make writing code faster and easier.^[3]

The YUI Library project at Yahoo! was founded by Thomas Sha and sponsored internally by Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang; its principal architects have been Sha, Adam Moore, and Matt Sweeney. The library's developers maintain the YUIBlog; the YUI community discusses the library and implementations in its community forum.

Also associated with the YUI Library, the YUI Theater, founded and managed by Eric Miraglia, provides worldwide access to more than 50 talks by notable speakers on JavaScript and web development.

Features

The YUI Library is fully documented on its website; detailed API documentation accompanies the library download. It has six types of components: YUI core, utilities, UI controls, CSS components, developer tools, and build tools.

Core

The YUI Core is a light (31KB minified) set of tools for event management and DOM manipulation.

YAHOO Global Object

The Yahoo Global Object contains language utilities and other baseline infrastructure for YUI.

Dom Collection

Helps with common DOM scripting tasks, including element positioning and CSS style management.

Event Utility

Provides developers with easy and safe access to browser events (such as mouse clicks and key presses). It also provides the Custom Event object for publishing and subscribing to custom events.

Utilities

Animation

Helps create "effects" by animating the position, size, opacity or other characteristics of page elements.

Browser History Manager

Helps web applications use the browser's back button and bookmarking functionality.

Connection Manager

Helps manage XMLHttpRequest transactions in a cross-browser fashion. It has integrated support for form posts, error handling, callbacks and file uploading.

Cookie

Allows you to manage browser cookies and subcookies through a simple API.

DataSource

Provides a common configurable interface for other components to interact with different types of data, from simple JavaScript arrays to online servers over XHR.

Drag and drop

The YUI Drag and Drop Utility makes it easy to make elements draggable and to create drop targets that respond to drag events.

Element

Provides a wrapper for HTML elements in the DOM and makes simpler common tasks such as adding listeners, manipulating the DOM, and setting and getting attributes.

Get

The Get Utility supports the asynchronous loading of data and scripts through script nodes and the dynamic loading of external CSS files.

ImageLoader

YUI's ImageLoader allows you to defer the loading of images that are not visible in the viewport at the time the page loads. This can result in big performance boosts.

JSON

The JSON Utility provides methods for validation of incoming JSON data to verify that it is safe and methods to convert JavaScript data to a JSON-formatted string. These methods are based on Douglas Crockford's work at JSON.org.

Resize

Allows you to make any block-level HTML element resizable.

Selector

The YUI Selector Utility allows you to grab references to HTML elements via CSS3 selector syntax.

YUI Loader

YUI Loader is a client-side loader engine that can dynamically load any YUI component (and dependencies) on the fly.

Controls

AutoComplete

Provides autocomplete feature (suggestion lists and type-ahead functionality) for user interactions involving text-entry. It supports a variety of data-source formats. It also supports server-side data-sources via XMLHttpRequest.

Button

Enables the creation of rich, graphical buttons that function like traditional HTML form buttons.

Calendar

A graphical, dynamic control used for date selection.

Charts

The Charts Control retrieves data via the DataSource Utility and displays the data in a variety of common chart formats (line, bar, pie, etc.).

Color Picker

The Color Picker Control provides a rich visual interface for color selection.

Container

Supports a variety of DHTML windowing patterns including Tooltip, Panel, Dialog, SimpleDialog, Module and Overlay.

DataTable

Simple yet powerful API to display screen-reader accessible tabular data on a web page. Notable features include sortable columns, pagination, scrolling, row selection, resizeable columns, and inline editing.

ImageCropper

ImageCropper provides the UI and interactive elements for a client-side image cropper.

Layout Manager

Allows you to create cross-browser, pixel perfect layouts with little effort by providing a fixed layout containing, top, bottom, left, right and center layout units.

Menu

Provides an easy API for creating fly-out menus, menu bars, and context menus.

Rich Text Editor

The YUI Rich Text Editor is a sophisticated client-side text-processor that is modular and highly configurable, suitable for any open-ended text-entry situation.

Slider

Provides a generic slider element that enables the user to choose within a finite range of values on one or two axes.

TabView

Provides navigable tabbed views of content; supports dynamic loading of tab content via XMLHttpRequest.

TreeView

Produces a content tree whose nodes can be expanded and contracted.

Uploader

Allows for multi-file file upload with feedback on upload progress.

CSS resources

CSS Base

Use Base after Reset to provide a consistent, cross-browser replacement for the standard browser CSS rules to which web developers are accustomed.

CSS Grids

Seven basic page wireframes with subsection components to support over 1000 different page layouts.

CSS Fonts

Standardized cross-browser font families and size rendering.

CSS Reset

CSS declarations remove margins and standardize cross-browser rendering on common elements.

Developer tools

Logger

Provides a quick and easy way to write log messages to an on-screen console, the Firebug extension for Mozilla Firefox, or the Safari JavaScript console.

Profiler

A cross-browser, non-visual code profiler for JavaScript.

ProfilerViewer

Used in combination with Profiler to provide rich visualizations of your profiling data — both graphically (using the Charts Control) and in tabular format (using DataTable).

YUI Test

YUI Test is a testing framework for browser-based JavaScript solutions. Using YUI Test, you can easily add unit testing to your JavaScript solutions. While not a direct port from any specific xUnit framework, YUI Test does derive some characteristics from nUnit and JUnit.

Build tools

YUI Compressor

YUI Compressor is a JavaScript and CSS minifier designed to be safe and yield a higher compression ratio than most other tools.

YUIDoc

YUIDoc is a tool written in Python that generates searchable API documentation of JavaScript code. It is typically used as part of a build process. YUIDoc is comment-driven and is compatible with a variety of coding styles and programming languages.

See also

• Comparison of JavaScript frameworks

References

External links

• YUI 2.x Home Page
• YUI 3.x Home Page
• YUI Project Site and Issue Trackers
• YUI Public Source Code Repository
• Yahoo! User Interface Blog
• Download YUI
• Yahoo! Design Patterns Library
• YUICoder.com - Manipulating the Yahoo! User Interface (covers old YUI 2.x)
• "Writing Your First YUI Application" on InsideRIA (covers old YUI 2.x)