May 14, 2007

YUI is Everywhere These Days

With apologies in advance to cat lovers (I have two cats!), it's hard to swing a dead cat on the Internet these days and not bump into someone using, talking about, or looking for YUI. YUI, in case you don't already know, is the Yahoo! User Interface library that's becoming an increasingly popular choice for building web sites with flexible and highly interactive interfaces.

Just last week I came across AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits in Dr. Dobb's Portal. In that article, Andrew Turner and Chao Wang compare and contrast several AJAX Frameworks.

Several AJAX frameworks were available, and we had to choose the appropriate one for our project—a process that required a significant amount of research and testing. For instance, our requirements included ongoing support for a variety of browsers and usability that had to be maintained.

We educated ourselves, examined several AJAX libraries, and performed browser and load testing throughout the project. The new AJAX-based retirement-plan website was deployed to production in mid-December 2006. To date, we've received excellent feedback, and we hope you benefit from the process we used to evaluate AJAX libraries and develop our first AJAX-enabled application.

With that introduction, they drill into three candidates (Dojo, Prototype, and YUI) and rank them on a variety of attributes. In the end they declared YUI the winner.

Our development team settled on the Yahoo! User Interface Library. And in the long run, our decision worked well for this and other projects.

We're especially impressed by how well YUI scored on Documentation, Download Size, and Ease of Maintenance.

If that wasn't enough, a little digging on some job sites has turned up several mentions of YUI in job listings. At last count we saw something like this:

• Monster.com : 17
• SimplyHired : 98
• Dice.com : 27
• Yahoo! HotJobs: 27

No, I'm not hunting for a job. But hiring managers have apparently noticed that YUI developers are a pretty talented group.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at May 14, 2007 3:44 PM

Comments

Posted by: Chris at May 15, 2007 4:58 PM

Posted by: john stamos at June 1, 2007 6:48 AM