Yahoo Stops New Development On YUI 79
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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Thank god for the Alibaba IPO. Someone has to pay for Tumblr.
This being said she can't take the whole blame for the Yahoo downfall. The company was already not doing well. At least they got some press coverage and nice photo ops out of the deal.
Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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You should be using Chrome anyway.
Yep - Google needs to know all my browsing history
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Fairly sure Chrome doesn't phone-home these details to Google. Maybe it does if you 'sign-in in Chrome', but I never saw the point in that.
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Who would you rather have know your browsing history? Google or Microsoft. No way IE doesn't have some secret phone home feature.
Says you (Score:2)
Chrome is is just like IE for more operating systems, no thanks I won't touch the stuff. Rating things on a combination of user security and functionality, Opera is hard to beat with Firefox in a close 2nd. I don't care how fast Chrome can load pages, I don't sit and watch memes flash by all day.
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In what way is it just like IE?
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I am using IE for the first time now because i got a 4K screen and IE does a much better job at font rendering than chrome at that resolution.
Most likely firefox would be similar since it also uses Direct2d and DirectWrite but IE is ok for now.
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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.
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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
Re:Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Not that any of that helped HealthCare.gov. I guess jQuery hasn't implemented polishLegislativeTurd() yet.
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.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.
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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?
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You quoted it. There's years worth of analysis there.
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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.
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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
Microsoft To Drop Support For Older Versions of IE (Score:2)
You better plan to support IE 8 until 2019
Why, when Microsoft itself will stop issuing security updates for IE 8 in January 2016 [slashdot.org]?
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Corporate apps and products coming out TODAY require IE 8 and MS specific hacks just to run
Then the people in your procurement division are morons. Why would they buy shit like that?
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The fact that your company is a dinosaur is not anyone else's problem. Microsoft does not care about losing your "business", which would consist of upgrading away from Windows 7 in 2019.
Re: Continuous improvements to IE for Windows 7 (Score:2)
But all companies operate the same. Everything out there only works in old IE
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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
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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.
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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)
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
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No jQuery, bootstrap, foundation or backbone... yet node.js? Me thinks either the submitter or editor does not know what node is.
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And yet, you still didn't understand why they mentioned Node.js.
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What does Yahoo! do?
In Soviet Russia, Yahoo does YUI.
Ya-who? (Score:2, Offtopic)
If I didn't maintain burner email accounts with them out of sheer inertia, they wouldn't even be on my radar.
Get your lingo right (Score:3)
If you maintain an email account, it's not a burner.
Dr Yui (Score:2)
Yeo, I thought he was the doctor that was the traitor in the Atreides camp because the Harkonnens had his wife hostage.
YUI YUI (Score:2)
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"YUI-YUI
oh, baby
we gotta go. .
Glad I picked Dojo for a new project! :-) (Score:1)
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)
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.
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By using two of the most popular languages in the world?
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Re:Read the article vs. the summary? (Score:2)
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)
um (Score:2)
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)
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.
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I use the YUI minifier on my projects, you know if they are discontinuing that too? It is more of an auxiliary tool than part of the framework itself right?
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The YUI minifier is being maintained by a community member, but we at Yahoo actually use UglifyJS instead now.
You can take a look at our configuration here: https://github.com/yahoo/yuglify [github.com]
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It must take forever to move all those zeros and ones around.
I prefer to code my javascript entirely from a text editor.
Last Year's Toys (Score:1)
Fix groups! (Score:2)
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!