October 31, 2007

Rounded Corners, Drop Shadows, and Other Inconvenient Facts of Life

One of our favorite internal discussions--right up there with the true cause of global warming and why folks can't seem to park in one space--concerns the best way to do rounded corners, drop shadows, translucent backgrounds, and other tasty browser candy. Here are techniques from three of Yahoo!'s finest front-end engineers, Scott Schiller, Leslie Sommer, and Hedger Wang:

• Even More Rounded Corners with CSS - Scott's work showed throughout Yahoo! Photos, and is starting to be seen here and there on Flickr. Examples here are single-image, PNG-based, fluid rounded corner dialogs with support for borders, alpha transparency, gradients, patterns, and more.
• CSS Mojo: Adding Visual Polish To Your Pages - Leslie's presentation for Web Design World 2007. Four examples, including rounded corners with solid background and image-free "pointy tail," two-sided translucent drop shadows with and without translucent content areas and gradients, and four-sided "glowy shadows." Leslie's technique is easy on the markup, uses no Javascript, and is (mostly) semantically valid; currently it's being used in Mash, 360, and other places.
• Single-Image Backgrounds - Hedger's examples stretch and apply translucency to a single image, to achieve maximum flexibility with minimum markup and server load. Look for Hedger's magic boxes in a future version of Yahoo! Groups.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, remember that your voice counts. Ask questions, especially when a decoration-heavy design flies over the wall between design and engineering and lands on your desk. Is all that really necessary? Does it add meaning to the page, or is it just really pretty?

And if you're tired of the wall, try a few of these suggestions:

Tearing Down the Wall between Design and Front-End Engineering

• Show up early. If possible, get to that very first meeting, when everything is still up in the air. By doing so you will make clear to your product manager, your designer, and your back-end support that front-end engineering is a discipline at least as important as any of theirs.
• Make your presence known. Contribute bright ideas, and ask hard questions. If your designer is asking for something that's only going to make sense in Safari, be loud and clear when you point out that most of your audience is still using IE, and deserves the full experience. Understand the tools available to you; there are a ton upstairs in the Yahoo! User Interface section. (First-time visitors should pay special attention to the Grids, Reset, and Fonts sections.)
• Be a champion of the New. Prototype those sweet new approaches; make sure your designer knows you are actually interested in building the new stuff, not just thinking up reasons why the old stuff is sufficient and should not be changed. And, speaking of which:
• Release the Old. This is especially important if you had anything to do with the previous version's design or implementation; your designer is dealing with enough stress as it is without having to worry about potential foot-dragging from you. Make a special point--yes, say it out loud, or in an e-mail--of telling the rest of your team that you are ready, willing, and able to move things along to the next level.
• Just say Yes. Remember the first rule of improvisational comedy: no suggestion, no matter how bizarre, can ever be met with resistance. This is especially true during those early brainstorming meetings; whatever it is, take it, run with it, make it even crazier, and toss it back. Designers love this; it takes away their chief source of anxiety, the possibility that they're promising something that you can't deliver.

Are we overstepping? Did we miss anything? Got a hot tip for rounded corners? Please leave us a comment and let us know.

Kent Brewster

Posted at 8:24 AM | Comments (2)

October 26, 2007

Web Site Optimization: a Practical Perspective

Stoyan Stefanov just published an article entitled Web Site Optimization: 13 Simple Steps. People have commented that Yahoo!'s Performance Rules are geared towards large web sites (like Yahoo!). Stoyan's article approaches the best practices from a different angle.

This tutorial takes a practical, example-based approach to implementing those rules. It's targeted towards web developers with a small budget, who are most likely using shared hosting, and working under the various restrictions that come with such a setup.

He also brings up some points that aren't mentioned in Yahoo's best practices, such as:

• increasing parallel downloads by splitting resources across multiple domains
• hosting static resources on a domain that's free of cookies
• configuring compression in different environments
• code examples for preloading resources
• tools for minifying CSS

A quick aside about Stoyan: Stoyan blogs on phpied.com and has co-authored several books including PHP Programming with PEAR and Building Online Communities with phpBB 2. Although he started this article awhile ago, when we saw his work on performance and optimization we asked Stoyan to join the Exceptional Performance team. Now he's a speedfreak with the rest of us! Watch for more news from Stoyan in the future.

Steve Souders

Posted at 9:16 AM | Comments (0)

University Hack Days in the UK - with a difference

Following the great success from last year's first European University Hack Program in Dundee/Scotland, Yahoo! Europe started working with the University of East London.

The structure of university hack programs in Europe is different from Open Hack Days and the US University Hack Days. The main difference is that it is not a 24 hour hacking frenzy - instead the program runs alongside the studies and in some cases is part of the course.

This approach was engineered in conjunction with universities and successfully executed in Dundee last year. The main idea is to bring the "ethical hack" mentality to universities and give students some insight into how companies like Yahoo! work and what mind-set fuels their innovation. The other idea is that instead of a one day Hackfest we allow students more time to get to know our APIs and other goodies we offer on the Yahoo Developer Network.

The difference is reflected in the structure of the program:

• We go to Universities, explain the program, show examples of nice hacks and share success stories.
• We give some technical presentations explaining the technologies we use, where to find our APIs and how to use them.
• Students then get a week time to make up their mind if they want to have a go at a hack.
• If wanted, students can send their hack ideas in and get feedback.
• The students then get a certain period of time (defined by the university) to create their hack.
• After that we go back to the university, check out the different hacks, crown the winners and typically end up in the student union celebrating with all involved.

That is the plan, which is flexible and can be altered on a case-by-case basis depending on what kind of University and course we partner with.

Yesterday the Uni Hack Team went to the University of East London to give talks about technologies to build web interfaces, the Symfony PHP Framework and practices how to ensure the scalability of your web applications. On the first of November we'll go up to Scotland to initiate the sequel to last year's hack program at Dundee University.

We'll keep you informed about the happenings and progress and are very happy to get this opportunity to give future hackers a glimpse of what companies like Yahoo! do.

Chris Heilmann

Posted at 3:16 AM | Comments (1)

October 25, 2007

Building Front-Ends? Join The Fronteers

Seminal JavaScript and general front-end maestro Peter-Paul Koch, whose quirksmode site is the preferred analgesic for those many painful JavaScript and CSS moments, has established a professional organization for front-end engineers called Fronteers (FRONT-end enginEERS). He gave a talk at Yahoo! last week about Fronteers, and you can read all about it on the YUI blog. The talk was video-taped and is available on YUI theatre in Yahoo! Video format as well as an iPod/iPhone-compatible format. You can also view his presentation slides.

Jason Levitt

Posted at 3:30 PM | Comments (1)

October 23, 2007

Lots of Pipes Updates!

A few days ago I got word that the latest release of Yahoo! Pipes would be out soon. As of last night, it's been pushed out for the entire world to see.

What's new you ask? Several things:

• Language encoding and character set fixes
• Regex module enhancements
• Improved Pipes search
• iPhone access to Pipes
• Lots of bug fixes

Read more about it on the following blog posts from the Yahoo! Pipes blog:

• Squishing Bugs + module and site enhancements
• Find those pipes!
• iphone.pipes.yahoo.com: Access your mashup while mobile

We'll also have some video on-line soon about the iPhone access. Stay tuned. :-)

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 3:40 PM | Comments (2)

October 22, 2007

Berkeley University Hack Day Wrap-Up

From our man on the spot, Rasmus Lerdorf:

Berkeley Hack Day happened Friday at a frenetic pace. We invaded the Woz in Soda Hall and students were trickling in and out all day with a core group of four hack teams staying for the duration and a couple of teams working remotely. The teams fought Java, Python, C++ and PHP all day long, with Java defeating at least a couple of team members with its multiple layers of input streams required just to pull in a simple text file. We also fought with RSS feeds from Craigslist, news archives and local Berkeley event listings.

In the end it was a very close race between two hacks that rose above the rest: an extremely useful carpool commuter application that matched up peoples' addresses and their daily destinations and tried to organize the most efficient combination of carpools, and a magnificent hack that provided a cell phone interface to the old game of Twenty Questions. The impressive mix of technologies required to answer the call automatically, acquire the data for the twenty questions, do the text-to-speech translation and issue the FFT code to decipher the user responses from the cell phone won over the judges to take the top prize.

Here are the Berkeley entries:

• Ryan Luecke and Friends - Psychic Skype Hotline
• Carpool Commuter Hack
• Suhaas Prasad, Min Xum, Ryan Zheng, Jerry Zhang - International News Map
• INGAPO (Meet-There)
• Capture the Flag Pac-Man

Winners: Psychic Skype Hotline, Carpool Commuter Hack, INGAPO, and Capture the Flag Pac-Man. Pictures are up on Flickr; look for the University Hack Day wrap-up shortly after Stanford concludes, November 9th.

Kent Brewster

Posted at 9:53 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

Zawodny On Cranky Geeks

Free music, free love (with robots), and social networking are some of the topics that our own Jeremy Zawodny will discuss with Sebastian Rupley, Editorial Director of PCMagCast.com, and John Furrier, founder of PodTech, on episode 86 of John Dvorak's Cranky Geeks. Send your comments and questions to crankygeeks@ziffdavis.com before 12 noon PST today and maybe you can contribute to the melee madness. Or will it be tame, civilized discourse? We'll soon find out!

Jason Levitt

Posted at 8:20 AM | Comments (1)

October 16, 2007

2007 University Hack Day Season: Game On!

Hackers, hackers everywhere ... recently we've been in Bangalore for an Open Hack Day, in Sunnyvale for another quarterly internal Hack Day, and all across the USA, for the second season of University Hack Day.

If you haven't heard about University Hack Day, here's a taste:

"University Hack Day is your chance to develop something that will revolutionize the industry, or at least make people laugh. (Yes, we're really that easy.) Oh and: yes, there are prizes. Adoration from your peers, huge recognition from top talent at Yahoo!, unique trophies and (of course!) tons of t-shirts, so you can put off that laundry run for yet another week."

Halfway through the season, here's what we've seen so far.

From Carnege-Mellon University:

• Brian Krausz - Map Tag
• Matt Thompson - flolcatr
• Matt Thompson (again) - Demograph
• Paul O'Shannessy - yWeather
• Sam Hashemi and Steve Hillenii - Traffic

Winners: Demograph, Map Tag, and Traffic.

From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

• Alex Lambert - Telescreen
• Andy Ying - FlightTracker 2.0
• Chad Weider - FlickrType
• Cyrus Omar - Context
• Emily Tse - Y! Contacts (Yahoo! Widget)
• Greg Schechter, Ben Juang - University Search Widget
• Rahul Mailk Kyle Millns, Adil Dhanani - Flava
• Robert Boyce, Elizabeth Ford, Mo Kudeki, and Jessa Wang - Columbus
• Sameer Sundresh, Justin Conroy, Andy Ying - Name My Job!
• Steve Bezek - Personalized Digg Stories
• Steven Kloder, Greg Schechter - Gas Maps: Pricing Your Road Trips
• Suraj Samaranayake, Dave Alongi, Mike Barker - Mosaic
• Will Duff - Pages
• You Lin - Visual Del.icio.us

Winners: Pages--which we ought to just go ahead and put online in the YUI section--Telescreen, and FlightTracker.

Overall Impressions

From our man on the spot, Rasmus Lerdorf:

"The energy in the room was good. The Flickr API key distribution mechanism went down which was a slight speedbump for one hack, but the Flickr folks were quick to fix it. We also found an interesting race condition in YUI which we now have a workaround for. Alex discovered that 2147483648 is a special number, we debated fuel economy optimization strategies for the "Passing Gas" hack, stepped through cache management code, found out that not having name attributes on form fields makes MooTools flake out, and Rahul won the Faceball game. I had to bail at around 2:30am, but there were still 15 people in the room hacking away when I left. The spirit of Hack Day is alive and well at both CMU and UIUC!"

While UIUC is way out in front on sheer numbers, we're thrilled by the level of creativity shown by the CMU hackers. Flolcatr, in particular, seems like it might be a break-out success on the level of Mo Kakwan's Blabberizer, first seen at Open Hack Day in Sunnyvale.

Will UIUC's domination continue? Not if the hackers from UC Berkeley and Stanford have anything to say about it. We'll have updates after Stanford finishes up, early in the week of November 12th ... stay tuned!

Kent Brewster

Posted at 10:05 AM | Comments (1)

October 15, 2007

Jeremy on the Bungee Line, part 2

As a follow-up to Jeremy on the Bungee Line, the folks at Bungee Labs have posted part 2 of our discussion.

In the second half hour, we discussed Mash, Hadoop, the fact that There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS) (among other things).

Again, I had a great time chatting with the Bungee guys. I'm always surprised when semi-intelligible stuff comes out of a mostly ad-hoc plan. :-)

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 12:37 PM | Comments (1)

October 12, 2007

Stats for the iFlickr iPhone app

At our internal Hack Day last week Yahoo! engineer Pradeepta Dash showed some neat tricks with his iPhone app called iFlickr. While I can't share the details of his hack, Pradeepta did give me permission to share some of the stats on iFlickr from his AppID usage report to date.

iFlickr is a capture and auto-upload application for your iPhone camera. Once you authorize the app on your iPhone, you can start taking pictures and sending them directly to your Flickr account. You have privacy and tagging options, but, best of all, Pradeepta uses Yahoo! ZoneTags to capture location data which gets sent along with your photo. I'm also enamored with the resolution of the images iFlickr gets from the iPhone camera.

Now, it doesn't surprise me that he has so many users (well over 5k as of this post), but I am actually a little surprised at how active those users are. You can see from his AppID report that iFlickr is uploading over 300 images per hour. Impressive.

Matt McAlister

Posted at 5:00 PM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2007

Combining Tagspaces with Yahoo! Pipes

Yesterday Jon Udell asked if anyone had an easy way to combine a bunch of tagged items--basically creating the union of a bunch of RSS feeds.

Is there a service that will deliver a feed containing the union of tagged items for one tag across a set of various services? For example, the union of:

del.icio.us/tag/astronomy
technorati.com/posts/tag/astronomy
flickr.com/photos/tags/astronomy
connotea.org/tag/astronomy
wordpress.com/tag/astronomy/
…etc…

Easy to do, I suppose, but I don’t want to reinvent a wheel.

Amusingly, I immediately thought of Yahoo! Pipes and was going to post a response in his comments. But when I clicked through to do so, I noticed that his astute readers beat me to it. :-)

Be sure to check the other comments for more discussion and other similar solutions, some of which also involve Pipes.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 1:40 PM | Comments (1)

October 7, 2007

Results of the Open Hack Day Bangalore 2007

The first Hackday in India is over! About 100 hackers took on the challenge to take the Yahoo! APIs and create something using them in 24 hours. In the end, we had 31 submitted hacks and each team or single hacker had his 90 seconds of fame presenting the hack on three massive screens to the whole assembled audience and the 7 judges.

Overall impression

Let me say first of all that all the hacks were of a very high quality and the India hackers didn't fall into the trap of showing the classic Mash-Up of showing some information on a map and declaring it their hack. Instead the judges decided on the following winners:

Best "Non-Technical" hack: Yahoo! Hindi Search

Also known as "we admire the cheek", this hack was the presenter going up there and declaring that he does not know any coding but realized that it is a shame that you cannot type search queries in Hindi but that they show up in English type instead. He then went on to show Yahoo! where to get a live translation of the search query to Hindi type, and that we should implement that. We loved the implementation of the hack idea called the "developers itch". Hacks are there to work around things that annoy you with existing applications, and that is why we deemed it worthy to give this one a price.

Best "Really Needs an Interface" hack: Del.icio.us Tag Management

This was a set of ruby scripts shown in 10pixel Courier on the bash that allowed you to deal with your tags in del.icio.us in a more automated fashion. The first script identifies duplicates like "movie" and "movies", asks you which to keep and automatically renames all tags accordingly. The second script allowed you to create bundles of tags instead of having to do them by hand inside del.icio.us.

"Most Parallel" hack: Collaborative Browsing

Collaborative browsing was an application using xmpp4mosh plugin for mozilla , greasemonkey and javascript to allow two or more users to surf web sites in parallel. Without having to use a server as a proxy the gestures of one user are replicated for the others, which would allow for an easy way to show others how to use a site or find information online.

Best "Desktop Hack": Desktop Wallpaper Love

Desktop Wallpaper Love is a windows application that created a desktop wallpaper from images collected from flickr and filtered through the Yahoo! Buzz feeds. You could run it as a service and have a daily wallpaper of all things that are hot right now.

"I wish I had a Mac" Hack: Third Tag

Third Tag is a Yahoo! Widget sitting in the bottom right corner of your screen that allows you to tag files to make it easier for you to find them much like Quicksilver or Finder on Mac allows you to. In addition to being able to drag files into the widget and add the tags you can also drag text files and get a list of recommended tags based on their content.

"Most Viral" hack: Facebook Friend Folio

This facebook application allowed you to see all your friends, their photos (facebook and flickr), their geographic location on a map, their horoscope and their favourite movies in one single interface instead of having to click through each facebook profile.

"Best Self Expression" hack: Smart Editor

Smart editor is a YUI Rich Text Editor that analyses the text you type while you type it and uses several APIs to show you relevant photos from flickr, news items and book recommendations from amazon to drag into the editor if you want to enhance your text with multimedia. This can save you a lot of time when you want to blog about a certain event, for example.

"Most likely to arrive at next Hack Day on time": Social Routing

This application is a maps hack that uses the traffic APIs to show you how likely it is to arrive some place in time. As the really cool social extra it also interfaces with twitter to allow for your friends or "people in the field" to report street blockages and gridlock as and where they occur and offers shortcuts and alternatives based on the wisdom of the community using the app.

"Brainiest Hack": YaHealer!

YaHealer was hack that allows doctors to share photos of a brain scan over two Yahoo! widgets that are connected over the web and change in sync. The hack showed a photo set of a brain scan and allowed the first user to go back and forth in the set, highlight parts of the brain and chat with the second user. The changes on the first widget would be reflected in the other and there was also a multiple undo option. This would allow for collaborative annotation of large sets of images (for example also architectural blueprints) without either user having to download the whole set of photos.

"Best in Show": Maps Doodle

The best in Show hack is an implementation of Yahoo! Maps with a Canvas overlay. This allows you to doodle on maps or highlight a way to walk to a certain destination much easier than creating the lines using the API. Furthermore, your movements as you draw are being recorded and you can send them to a friend as a URL so that he or she can re-play what you have drawn out for them.

The other hacks

• FlickOff! - A Flex implementation allowing you to search for a movie, see its reviews, drill down to information about the director, actors with photos and see the trailers. If you are happy with everything you can directly go to netflix and rent the movie.


• favrRoots - A hack that allows you to create tree structures from data, sort them by dragging and dropping and turn them into voting interfaces.


• zooky - A messenger plugin that allows you to use the zooky search engine to find relevant results and photos to your queries


• Google Search Assist - An implementation of Yahoo!'s Search Assist for Google.


• For now this is it - A music player that allows for live discussion, collaborative tagging and matching international stars to their Indian equivalents.


• Dark Humour - A search mashup trying to give you a daily dose of comics and geek humour directly without having to click through a lot of sites to find the funnies


• No man's land - A mashup to find your way around in the city you just moved to. Shows you where the ATMs are, what movies and events are on and photos of the localities you might want to visit.


• Jugad - A search mashup that allows you to create statistics of search results on the fly, like comparing the net income of certain countries.


• How big can you think? - A messenger plugin that shows larger toast messages (the things popping up on the bottom right) with the user's avatars when they go online.


• Daily Prophet - A Flash Mashup showing you all the multimedia and text information for a tag you entered by creating a "daily prophet" (from the Harry Potter movies) style news interface.


• Visualizr - Renders graphical stories from the text you entered using the Yahoo! Term Extractor and Flickr.


• SlickRnot! - A rating system for flickr in the style of "hot or not"


• Wiki Changers - An animated live interface of where in the world changes to Wikipedia come from.


• Offline Flickr - A Google Gears implementation taking a snapshot of your flickr page to browse offline


• Seam Carver for Flickr - An implementation of the content aware image resizing algorithm for Flickr.


• YUI RTE Transliteration Plugin - A plugin for the YUI Rich Text Editor that allows you to convert highlighted text to Hindi type.


• Yahoo! Search Mashup - What it says on the tin. Showing search results, photos, videos news and answers on a single result page


• Super Meebo - A Greasemonkey extension for Meebo.com to show live cricket results, change your status messages on all chat systems and twitter your status message.


• Blogckr - Show photos corresponding to selected text on a blog.


• Video News Mashup - Adding relevant videos to Yahoo! news instead of still photos.


• HackBuzzer - A windows app turning your laptop into a surveilance system using a USB camera and a shape detection system.

Conclusion

All in all we want to thank all the hackers for putting so much effort into it and coming up with such a wide range of hacks and ideas. All that was left after seeing all this was to get down and party.

We hope everybody had fun and that we'll see more un-conference style happenings in the area soon. I am back to the UK next week to see what we can do there again.

Chris Heilmann

Posted at 12:07 AM | Comments (13)

October 6, 2007

Open Hackday Update: Hack submission started

With some 4 hours to go the submission of hacks has started and the first few proud hackers show me what they have done before having some food and collapsing on a bean bag to catch some sleep.

It seems that the YUI Rich Text Editor is a popular YUI widget to hack with and I've seen two nice implementations for smarter editors using ideas I've seen in messenger plugins beforehand.

Right now breakfast is being served, too and you see hackers munching sandwiches with one hand while typing with the other. I guess that is what sandwiches where invented for...

We also had some late arrivers and someone with four hours to spare asked me what he should hack. The answer to that of course is whatever you want, as long as you use one of our APIs.

I am also amazed by the amount of mashed-up technologies. Right now I tried to help some people who use greasemonkey, XUL and server side magic to do a collaborate browsing platform. Others showed Yahoo maps with a Canvas overlay to paint your way to work and get the time it'll need you to get there as a result. Oh well, good luck with all the traffic. I am really looking forward to the presentations and will try my best to live-blog them later on.

Chris Heilmann

Posted at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)

October 5, 2007

Hello from Open Hack Day Bangalore

We got roughly 16 and a half hours left of hacking at Open Hack Day Bangalore and so far the feedback to the presentations and the questions of the hackers regarding APIs was very good and intriguing at the same time.

About 100 hackers are scattered around the massive and eloquently carpeted room in the Taj Residency Hotel in Bangalore, either sitting or sprawled on yellow and purple bean bags hacking away to meet the deadline and get one of the prices we managed to acquire or get through customs and different countries undamaged.

So far the feedback gives me an impression that the hacks are going to be much more backend-oriented than the ones we saw in England (people asked how to simulate browsers in windows apps for browser based authentication and the likes).

My presentation covering all the bits and bobs we offer as Yahoo! to developers and poking some fun at my pains to get here is available on slideshare and Creative Commons should you feel the need to re-use some of it:

As this is a hack day we kept the presentations short. Other things to hear were Adobe showing off their Flex and Air developer Kits and us explaining more details on Yahoo! Pipes and Maps for India.

That's it for now, I will keep up the information as this goes along and jetlag does not catch up with me. In between, go and check the photos on flickr.

Your man in the thick of it, Chris Heilmann

Posted at 11:16 AM | Comments (1)

R3 and Stickleback: Open Source Gold For PHP Developers

Need to maintain a web site or web application in multiple languages and localizations? You might be interested in Yahoo's r3. In case you missed the PHP Architect cover story from June, r3 is a Yahoo! open source project (on SourceForge) designed to help developers of web applications customize and translate their web pages and templates for different languages, markets, and uses.

In the spirit of "eat your own dog food," Yahoo! is using r3 internally with the Symfony framework as well as with standalone pages. Though still somewhat nascent, r3 is getting lots of love thanks to project manager Matt Zandstra along with business lead Fergus Sullivan, and co-conspirators Steve Webster, Bill Hails, Robin Baker, Ludovic Dreux, Chris Kaminski and Stone Li. Written in PHP and originally released as a command-line tool, r3 will soon have a spiffy new GUI thanks to this team. Stay tuned for future releases.

A completely separate open source project (which made the September cover of PHP Architect magazine) is Stickleback. Stickleback is a general purpose plug-in framework that you can use to add a plugin API to existing PHP web applications. Stickleback ships with tools for creating pluggable CLIs and GUIs. r3 uses Stickleback as its plugin engine so developers can write plugins to extend r3's functionality.

You can find out more about r3 and Stickleback, including some tutorials, at Matt Zandstra's unofficial blog. You can download the latest versions of r3 and Stickleback from their Sourceforge project pages: r3 Sourceforge Project - Stickleback Sourceforge Project

Jason Levitt

Posted at 8:40 AM | Comments (1)

October 4, 2007

YSlow 0.8 Patches Firebug's Net Panel

At Future of Web Apps in London I announced the release of YSlow 0.8. This update includes a few enhancements, but the biggest change is a patch to Firebug's Net Panel. I discovered that resources (scripts, stylesheets, images) read from the browsers cache (with no HTTP traffic) still show up in Net Panel. This has caused confusion when people thought their cacheable components were not actually being cached by the browser. I talked to Joe Hewitt and settled on a fix that comes with this version of YSlow. The full details are found in the article Bug (fix) in Firebug's Net Panel. Enjoy and send your feedback.

Steve Souders
Chief Performance Yahoo!

Posted at 3:47 PM | Comments (3)

Platform Dreams?

Over on the Union Square Ventures blog, Albert Wenger penned an excellent rant/request titled I Want a New Platform, partially inspired by the Huey Lews & The News song I Want a New Drug:

One that won’t go away (under load), one that doesn’t keep me up all night (worrying about scaling), one that won’t make me sleep all day (when I should be adding features). If you have tried to build an Internet site or application recently that needs to work for thousands or tens of thousands of concurrent users you may share this desire.

Why is this still so hard? Why do we find ourselves worrying about locating experts in the dark art of database performance tuning? Why are we spending time haggling with Rackspace over the price for another set of servers or racking our own servers at Equinix? Why are we writing our own user management (from scratch)?

He goes on to talk about the inadequacy of the tools we're all using.

Because we are using tools that simply were not made for the job. Relational databases have gotten faster and better, but their fundamental construct of data stored in rows and neatly parceled out across tables (which frequently need to be joined) does not really match up with either rapid development using some notion of objects or with scaling horizontally using commodity hardware. Web servers started out by simply providing static content and were then forced into running applications with the result of not doing either particularly well. Yes, people have been writing new ones to address that, but even those are fundamentally designed to work on a single machine. The second you go beyond one machine you need separate load balancers, reverse proxies, caches and all sorts of other paraphernalia just to make stuff work together. Worse yet, the web server, the application and the database are connected to each other via thin straws that were bolted on after the fact with important information either not passed at all or only painfully (e.g., information about which user is requesting a particular set of data).

The post goes on to talk about a lot of specific problems that everyone runs into sooner or later. It's a really good read, including the comments.

Our question for you, the developers looking to Yahoo! for technology, is this: What should Yahoo's role be in solving these problems? What high- or low-level services would help to change the game in building the next generation of on-line applications?

We clearly believe that Infrastructure like Hadoop is part of the solution. But that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 11:01 AM | Comments (4)

October 2, 2007

Jeremy on the Bungee Line

Our friends over at Bungee Labs (review) have started a podcast called The Bungee Line. A week or so ago I spent some time on the phone chatting with Ted and Alex about a whole bunch of stuff: Yahoo! APIs, Zimbra, Maps, Hack Day, and more.

In fact, we talked for so long that they broke the interview up in two parts. Part 1 is on-line now. It's just over 30 minutes long in MP3 format. You can read more about it in this post on the Bungee Connect Devlopet Network blog.

I enjoyed chatting with the Bungee guys and can't wait to hear the second part. It'll really help me to remember what we talked about. :-)

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 11:12 AM | Comments (2)

Checking In from Adobe MAX

We've just completed our main presentation at MAX, a session on the Inspire track entitled "Yahoo Loves You." Here's what you missed, if you weren't there:

• Allen Rabinovich - Flash Platform at Yahoo!
• Kent Brewster - Yahoo! Search + Adobe AIR = Air Search
• Thomas Sha - Yahoo! User Interface Libraries
• Josh Tynjala - Flash / JavaScript Hybrids, including YUI Charts
• Alaric Cole - ASTRA Components, including tabs, treeview, and autocomplete.
• Ian Kennedy - a sneak preview of the unreleased Flash Badge Kit, including a sneak preview from MyBlogLog.

Yesterday morning, Ryan Kennedy presented AIR Mail, an AIR application based on Dav Glass's Candygram Lite, using Yahoo! Mail's open API and the YUI libraries.

We spent the day at the Yahoo! booth in the community pavillion, giving away t-shirts to attendees brave enough to show us their kung fu. No, you don't have to throw any roundhouse kicks, although one developer did. We were more interested in seeing what you were doing on your own sites, and where we could help, with tools like the YUI library and YSlow. We're back today and tomorrow, so please come by and see us if you haven't already done so.

Also at MAX, Adobe launched the new-and-improved Adobe Developer Connection, their portal for developers to all things Adobe. Particularly interesting is the ADC introNetwork, a social network for developers who want to connect to other developers based on their professional background, skills, and personality traits. Kudos to team leader Jonathan Wall, and congratulations on choosing the Yahoo! User Interface library to help power ADC.

Kent Brewster, Yahoo! Developer Network

Posted at 8:32 AM | Comments (2)