JavaScript Framework Spotlight: YUI

Yahoo's Evan Goer, author of YUI 3 Cookbook explains why YUI is gaining widespread adoption.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Steve Bergman]

I shouldn't pretend to be an expert in JS libs. I'm new to the territory, and have long shunned client-side since I'm a big advocate of keeping most everything server side, "web 2.0" be damned. But I have been paying a lot more attention to client-side lately. And what you say reminds me so much of my views on Turbogears vs Django. Both server-side frameworks. TG was such a Frankenstein monster. I haven't gotten that feeling about JQ. But if you feel that it is, I understand your frustration.

[Joachim Larsen]

This could make for a rather lengthy laundry list of pros and cons, I'd say though that Evan has touched on many of the things that I would bring up. YUI3, to me, offers a whole greater than its parts - by virtue of those parts having been designed to fit together - while taking an approach that lets you be highly granular in which parts you want to use at a given time. In my experience, non-trivial jQuery projects results in one-of-a-kind Frankenstein monsters without discipline.

[Steve Bergman]

YUI is probably a very good library. One has all the mind-share considerations to deal with. And personal preference regarding API style. But Doug Crockford speaks highly of it. Of course, that was as a "Yahoo!" employee. But he's not the sort to lie about his true feelings. My choice has been JQuery. But then again I (and I should really say "little old me") used to post that Django should incorporate Prototype into their framework. The devs said "no". They were right & I was wrong. So hey! ;-)

[Joachim Larsen]

Yeah, jQuery certainly enjoys a numeric advantage - I'm a bit surprised that it is only marginally better for the top 1k sites: w3techs.com/technologies/cross­/javascript_library/ranking where YUI comes 2nd with 3.5%.

[Steve Bergman]

You can pretty much google any stats accumulator to see the relative use of YUI and other libraries. w3tech would be one source. It's pretty much JQuery everywhere, with all the many others fighting for the last 10%. w3tech shows YUI at about 2.5%.

[Joachim Larsen]

Got a link to that survey?

[John McLear]

Hate to be "that guy" but in a recent survey didn't YUI have a 3% decline or something?