Yahoo UI Library (YUI) - Anyone using with Rails? Comparis

Rails
1

Hi,

The Yahoo UI library http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ (YUI) seems to be
getting popular. A few questions if anyone has any
knowledge/experience:

Q1 - Would YUI complement a rails development? Or does it compete
directly
with prototype/scriptaculous?

Q2 - From the point of view of rich client web interfaces would you
recommend looking into YUI, or just stick with
rails/prototype/scriptaculous?

Tks

2

Q2 - From the point of view of rich client web interfaces would you
recommend looking into YUI, or just stick with
rails/prototype/scriptaculous?

No experience with YUI, but if the slow clunky, “new” yahoo mail is
using this library, then I wouldn’t bother with it. The performance is
not good.

3

On 29 Dec 2006, at 22:15, toby privett wrote:

Q2 - From the point of view of rich client web interfaces would you
recommend looking into YUI, or just stick with
rails/prototype/scriptaculous?

No experience with YUI, but if the slow clunky, “new” yahoo mail is
using this library, then I wouldn’t bother with it. The performance is
not good.

Indeed, YUI is very slow compared to the other JavaScript libs out
there. On my old PowerBook (our newer intel macs show good
performance with all libs) JQuery is probably the one with the
smoothest animations (using the Interface plugin). On top op that,
JQuery has a really nice syntax and small footprint.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

4

I’ve been using the Y! grids CSS which is kinda part of the YUI
package. I’d recommend it as it makes it nice and
easy to come up with a layout that fits whatever needs you have. You
simply use their classes and structure
your page containers properly and the heavy lifting is done for you
in terms of laying out major components in your
pages. This part of YUI does not compete with anything in rails and
is very complimentary.

-Michael
http://javathehutt.blogspot.com

5

Hi,

On 12/29/06, Greg H. [email protected] wrote:

The Yahoo UI library (YUI) seems to be getting popular. A few questions if
anyone has any knowledge/experience:

Q1 - Would YUI complement a rails development? Or does it compete directly
with prototype/scriptaculous?

It competes directly. Both libraries have Ajax components, Dom helpers
to find by classname, drag and drop. All the normal things. YUI has
good documentation and better JavaScript coding practices than
prototype/scriptaculous.

Q2 - From the point of view of rich client web interfaces would you
recommend looking into YUI, or just stick with
rails/prototype/scriptaculous?

I was disappointed enough with Prototype/Scriptaculous and I like the
Yahoo! UI enough that I have started a fork of the YUI to use with
Rails. My fork has forked quite a bit from YUI to make what I think
are some improvements but the main ideas of YUI guide many parts of my
fork. I have added the pieces needed to do all the nice Rails Ajax
stuff like RJS (though I think the ejs templates are better idea see
<URL: danwebb.net - MinusMOR Released!>). The first
official release of Fork JavaScirpt is only a couple weeks off.

<URL: http://forkjavascript.org>

Peter

6

Any idea when there will be a jquery implementation of the rails js
helpers
available? I came from a jquery environment, so I don’t really want to
learn
to work with prototype and scriptaculous if possible.

7

Michael - does it help out at all in terms of use of customized image
based
(created in photoshop) buttons - i.e. where one has to manually slice up
the
button image into pieces and then in the HTML have multiple DIVs around
the
text to hook the button images pieces onto? (i.e. gives web 2.0’ish
type
button but with the flexibility of the text itself not being part of the
image)

8

As someone who tries very hard to follow web standards and separate
style
from content [kinda like DRY for design. kinda] I’ve found jQuery to be
a
godsend. No more of that clunky, ugly embedded JavaScript inside your
HTML.
It might be easy to use those javascript helpers in Rails but it doesn’t
make for optimally DRY pages when each link restates the same code over
and
over. Then again, we’re all big boy [and girl] coders and are writing
our
own code instead of relying on scaffolds and predefined helpers, right?

RSL

9

On 1/3/07, Russell N. [email protected] wrote:

As someone who tries very hard to follow web standards and separate style
from content [kinda like DRY for design. kinda] I’ve found jQuery to be a
godsend. No more of that clunky, ugly embedded JavaScript inside your HTML.
It might be easy to use those javascript helpers in Rails but it doesn’t
make for optimally DRY pages when each link restates the same code over and
over. Then again, we’re all big boy [and girl] coders and are writing our
own code instead of relying on scaffolds and predefined helpers, right?

RSL

You know that the javascript library used has nothing to do with how
unobtrusive your code is, right? You can write unobtrusive,
accessible js in Prototype, Dojo, or Jquery.

re: the builtin in helpers in Rails, use this instead:
http://www.ujs4rails.com/

–

http://www.ajaxian.com

10

Agreed on the unobtrusive code with Prototype, et al. I didn’t mean to
make
it sound like those libraries always generate clunky code. It’s just
that
the close relationship between Rails’ javascript helpers [in-code
Javascript] and Prototype usually lead to a lot of onclick=“whatever”
nonsense that, for me, is best handled with jQuery’s js file approach.
YMMV

RSL