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Yahoo! Java Open Source Programming

Yahoo Stops New Development On YUI 79

Posted by samzenpus from the end-of-the-line dept.
First time accepted submitter dnebin writes Yahoo announced that they will cease new development on their javascript framework YUI, bowing to industry trends towards Node.js, Angular, and others. The announcement reads in part: "The consequence of this evolution in web technologies is that large JavaScript libraries, such as YUI, have been receiving less attention from the community. Many developers today look at large JavaScript libraries as walled gardens they don't want to be locked into. As a result, the number of YUI issues and pull requests we've received in the past couple of years has slowly reduced to a trickle. Most core YUI modules do not have active maintainers, relying instead on a slow stream of occasional patches from external contributors. Few reviewers still have the time to ensure that the patches submitted are reviewed quickly and thoroughly."
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Yahoo Stops New Development On YUI More

Yahoo Stops New Development On YUI

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  • From the featured article:

    Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards.

    I'm curious how long Microsoft will continue improving Internet Explorer for Windows 7. Microsoft has historically ended development of new IE features once a particular version of Windows goes into extended support. This means Windows Vista is stuck on IE 9, and unless IE 12 comes out before January 2015 [microsoft.com], Windows 7 will be stuck on IE 11. In any case, even IE 9 supports enough of the W3C DOM that you might not need jQuery [youmightno...jquery.com] or any other monolithic framework in your site's JavaScript. People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

    • People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

      Which is exactly why Microsoft does that, and why you should never build software that's dependent on closed source products. At best you're at the whim of the owner, and they may abandon you. At worst, they will see their position as leverage to force you into ever more expensive software contracts. Which is exactly what Microsoft does.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I really wish developers wouldn't use YUI or jQuery for things the web browser is more than capable of doing itself. As the entire obamacare site fiasco has shown, jQuery is just a bad idea in the hands of people who don't know when to use frameworks.

      When to use a framework:
      a) Never, as the default.
      b) When you need functionality wrapping in a non-user-facing part of a site, eg administrative controls, where the version of the framework can be frozen
      c) When the amount of javascript that needs to be written c

      • I really wish developers wouldn't use YUI or jQuery for things the web browser is more than capable of doing itself.

        The whole reason for things like jQuery is that under old IE, the web browser wasn't capable of doing a lot of these things itself. If you go to the You Might Not Need jQuery site and set the compatibility slider to IE 8, for example, a couple solutions end up as "just use jQuery". Not needing massive workarounds for deficiencies in the latest version of the included web browser on a still-supported PC operating system is a relatively new concept. Five months ago, a Windows operating system that couldn't be upgraded past IE 8 was still in extended support.

        • Broadening your point, jQuery does a fine job of harmonizing all of the bits of personality across vendors and versions. Buy all means, hack that javascript down by a factor of 100. . .but be sure to bulk up on testers and maintenance people to help you re-invent jQuery's host of fix-ups.
          Not that any of that helped HealthCare.gov. I guess jQuery hasn't implemented polishLegislativeTurd() yet.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by narcc ( 412956 )

            .but be sure to bulk up on testers and maintenance people to help you re-invent jQuery's host of fix-ups.

            You know that that's a long debunked myth, right?

            jQuery was never good at "harmonizing all of the bits of personality across vendors and versions". It even introduced it's own long list of browser incompatibilities. Remember the IE8 fiasco? That was all due to the grossly incompetent design of jQuery. It's all on c.l.j, if you're willing to do a bit of digging.

            I banned it ages ago, for technical reasons. I can't even begin to predict how many thousands of hours we've saved as a result.

            • It's all on c.l.j, if you're willing to do a bit of digging.

              I daresay if there was any substance to your point (and I've read the jQuery source at some depth around the 1.7 era) then you'd've proffered a URL to go with your FUD, no?

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by bluec ( 1427065 )
              I embraced it ages ago, for technical reasons. I can't even begin to predict how many thousands of hours we've saved as a result.

      • jQuery hardly qualifies as a "huge ass" javascript framework. The gzip minified production version of the script weighs in at under 34kB. Worst case scenario if you're hosting jQuery yourself, this is a one off download. This is hardly going to cause problems, even on a mobile data connection.

        On the other hand, jQuery does make code a lot neater. Especially with judicious use of selectors [jquery.com]

        .

        p.s. Nice going trying to pin the Obamacare fiasco on jQuery. I don't think I've heard that one before.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )
      The sooner that pile of garbage, AKA YUI, dies, the better. Pulling the plug will only make it go away faster, and faster is definitely better in this case. This will be the first time I cheer something related to YUI.

    • Ha!

      Good luck with that. Corporate apps and products coming out TODAY require IE 8 and MS specific hacks just to run. Because of this my employer will only buy software written to run on IE 8. Not W3C.

      You better plan to support IE 8 until 2019 when you are ready to switch to HTML 5 or we will buy from a competitor who will. 80% of all other large companies operate the same way so good luck.

      No way we will run classic shell or Windows 8. We just upgraded to Windows 7 for crying out loud! So expect jquery to be

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Camael ( 1048726 )

      People who can't give up IE might end up having to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell.

      Or, they could just stick with the browser and OS that they currently own.

      I suspect that most people who can't give up IE fall into 2 broad categories, namely those who need it for work to access some legacy corporate website and those who use IE for convenience because it came with their OS by default.

      Neither of these categories need the best and the brightest, and are thus likely to stick with the

      • Or those that want to use group policy to control what users can do with the browser which IE does better than all the other browsers unsurprisingly.

    • how long Microsoft will continue improving Internet Explorer for Windows 7

      For as long as Google will continue to update Chrome version 7. Why do you ask?

  • No mention of jQuery? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alphazulu0 ( 3675815 ) on Sunday August 31, 2014 @06:13PM (#47797159)

    I'm sure someone will point out that jQuery is more of a library and YUI more of a framework, but they solve many of the same problems and people don't usually use both. I imagine jQuery's popularity is one of the reasons for YUI's decline, but no mention of it in the announcement.

    az0

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No jQuery, bootstrap, foundation or backbone... yet node.js? Me thinks either the submitter or editor does not know what node is.

  • Ya-who? (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 )

    If I didn't maintain burner email accounts with them out of sheer inertia, they wouldn't even be on my radar.

  • A million deaths were not enough for YUI.

  • http://dojotoolkit.org/ [dojotoolkit.org] "Dojo starts with a minimal loader (less than 4KB gzipped) with thousands of loosely coupled lightweight modules and plugins available when you need them that are tested and maintained together for the best quality possible."

    A few things I like about it are:
    * internationalization
    * accessibility
    * modules
    * support for making your own widgets

    The first two (especially the second, accessibility) are examples of really important things that many developers leave for later when you are lock

  • YUI vs. Node.js ? (Score:3)

    by Mister Liberty ( 769145 ) on Sunday August 31, 2014 @08:21PM (#47797505)

    YUI and Node.js are juxtaposed here, whereas YUI (as far as I knew) was client-side and Node.js is server side javascript.
    Never used either (use PHP and pure Javascript), so the confusion may be mine.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dnebin ( 594347 )
      They seem to think the decline of support behind YUI is somewhat based on node and other newer frameworks.
    • I thought the same thing. How does a client side replace a server side. Are we going back to all thin clients.

    • You trusted the summary instead of reading the article. It's relatively brief, and it took me less than 10 seconds to roughly grasp the confusion.

      Node.js is a very tiny part of the whole explanation.

      Fuck it, you're not going to click so here's the relevant bits. I'm assuming Node.js injects script into the pages it creates, meaning those developers don't need script libraries (other than Node.js)

      The emergence of Node.JS has allowed JavaScript to be used on the server side, opening the door to creating iso

  • Yahoo announced that they will cease new development on their javascript framework YUI, bowing to industry trends towards Node.js, Angular, and others.

    That's like when people used to talk vaguely about "talk radio" while somehow studiously omitting Rush L.

    Just querying, ya know ...

  • I was a member of the YUI team... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by clarle ( 3806979 ) on Sunday August 31, 2014 @08:53PM (#47797617) Homepage
    First posted on /r/javascript on Reddit, but I think it's worth posting here too:

    I was a member of the YUI team until a few months ago. I'm still at Yahoo now, just on a different team, but just wanted to give my own thoughts on this (I don't represent the company or the YUI team).

    My software engineering career started with the YUI team - I actually joined as an intern at Yahoo because of a Reddit post on /r/javascript. I was pretty new to engineering in general back then, and as a biology major with no real professional experience, I didn't have an easy time getting internships. Jenny, the manager of the YUI team back then, really took a chance on me, and that really changed my entire career path. I solved a bunch of YUI bugs, added a few features here or there, and I always tried to help other folks on #yui on IRC, the mailing list, or in-person here at Yahoo, which I really enjoyed. I learned a crazy amount of JavaScript, some pretty advanced debugging / performance profiling techniques, and even gave some talks. Eventually, a lot of people always came to me first whenever they had a question about YUI, which was pretty cool.

    From the view of some people in the JavaScript community, YUI was always considered a huge, monolithic framework that was only good for widgets. I never thought that was the case - YUI pioneered a lot of the techniques that are popular in advanced JavaScript development today, like modules, dynamic loading, and creating logical view separation in your code. A lot of the influence in RequireJS / CommonJS / ES6 modules can be seen from what YUI did first, which people used to consider "over-engineering".

    With a lot of new development in JavaScript though (data-binding, tooling like Grunt / Yeoman, promises and other async handling techniques), it was always hard for YUI to keep up with new features while still being able to maintain backwards compatibility with the constantly deploying products that people were building at Yahoo. We had to support product teams while also building out the framework at the same time, and making sure the user-facing products were the best was more important. Eventually, it was hard when developers who were familiar with newer JavaScript tools tried to use YUI, but ended up having to spend quite some time with the framework just to get it working with the rest of the JS ecosystem.

    In the end, I wasn't involved with this decision, but I think it was the right thing to do. A lot of the YUI (now YPT) team and other front-end teams at Yahoo are now working on helping out with more cutting-edge core JavaScript work, like internationalization and ES6 modules [github.com], as well as building out components for newer frameworks like React and Ember [github.com]. Yahoo still has a lot of really strong front-end developers, and working on these more important core components is more beneficial to both Yahoo and the JS community as a whole, than continuing to maintain a framework that's a walled garden.

    The one thing to take away from this is that no technology lasts forever, and in the end, what the user sees is the most important, whether it's JavaScript, Android / iOS, or holographic smartwatches.

    I'll be a bit melancholy today, but I'll raise a glass to YUI tonight. Cheers to all the folks who worked on YUI, and everyone in the YUI community as well - I made a lot of friends there. RIP.

  • Sounds to me like the kids are bored with last year's toys and have become envious of the cool kids' new toys. Strange, because overall the old toys are still more popular than the new toys.

  • Maybe they can turn their attention back to some of their existing code. I'm the owner of a Yahoo group that is receiving spam. There is a spam folder but not all of the emails are marked as spam. I can find no way to mark them as spam. Doh!

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