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You'd hardly know it by going to maps.yahoo.com, but Yahoo! Maps are now pure JavaScript instead of a hybrid of Flash and JavaScript. Lead Maps Developer Mirek Grymuza and the Maps team have done an amazing job of seamlessly moving the Maps client over resulting in at least double the performance of the previous Flash-based version.
The good news for developers is that the new Yahoo! Maps client uses an enhanced version of our Maps AJAX API which will be available to developers in 2008. This substantial upgrade of the Maps API will provide access to all the overlay components available in the consumer client and will give developers significant overlay flexibility. It's going to be a great new year for Yahoo! Maps users and developers.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 11:24 AM | Comments (9)
It's called a ".5" release, but there's so much new developer candy in Yahoo! Widgets 4.5 that it sure looks like 5.0. Core Widgets developer Ed Voas takes us on a tour of the major new features in his recent blog post.
Ed points out that Widgets now has WebKit in the Widget Engine so that Widgets can be composed of HTML -- great for re-purposing those AJAX apps. Native support for playing Adobe Flash SWF files is now built-in using the ActiveX Control (Windows) and NPAPI (MacOSX) so you can run your existing Flash apps under the control of the Widget Engine. Full DOM support, a new JavaScript interpreter, and a debugger round out some of the significant new features.
Download the SDK (Windows only) or just get the individual docs and tools (MacOSX or Windows) here and start building.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
Hong Kong's first ever Barcamp on the 15th of December 2007 was a great success. Around 70 Barcampers spread out over four meeting rooms of the Yahoo! offices on the 27th floor in Sunning Plaza to share information and show solutions they've built.
In comparison to other barcamps I attended (Paris, London, Munich) I was especially amazed by the wide range of topics. Classics like “Seven ways to write better HTML” were covered as well as “Planning a startup in Hong Kong” and “Eclipse as a application framework” right up to discussion rounds covering social aspects of the web, privacy concerns and online community support. The quality of the presentations and the local recognition of the speakers was very high and it felt great to see a community you don't hear that much about shed the suits and go grassroots for a day. There was no overnight stay, just a day of networking and learning about each other. This was a conscious decision of the organizers as they weren't quite sure how the Hong Kong community would respond to the concept of an unconference.
The full list of presentations is available on the barcamp wiki and the slides will to a large degree be available on slideshare. As there was certainly no shortage of cameras in use there are already several dozen photos on flickr.
The barcamp was preceeded by a social mixing event at the prestigious “Why” nightclub. This is also where the mass exchange of business cards started. In the end, my yield counted around 30 which is something I didn't quite encounter on other barcamps.
While Yahoo! provided the location, other sponsors helped with printing the T-Shirts (with the whole back covered in coloured and great logos) and food (sandwiches and drinks – nothing Asian I'm afraid). Others sponsored the venue and drinks for the pre-party.
All in all it was a very enjoyable experience and I am not unhappy to have spent a day of my vacation there. It was great that it worked out very easily to get the organizers and Hong Kong Yahoos to agree on using our office as the location of the first HK Barcamp and I hope there are many more to come.
Christian Heilmann
Photo by ryanne lai
Posted by Matt McAlister at 9:34 AM | Comments (1)
Last week Tenni Theurer, manager of Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance group and my main performance co-hort, returned from her appearance at the CSDN-Dr.Dobbs Software Developer 2.0 Conference in Beijing, China. This was a big conference, perhaps the biggest software conference ever in China. I was psyched when Tenni told me her talk drew a crowd and was one of the best talks of the conference! CSDN's SD2.0 web site says, "Based on our SD conference survey result, Tenni Theurer’s session ranked as one of the top 3 sessions and was also selected by our editors as the most popular speaker." It's great to see interest in fast web pages has spread worldwide. Upcoming performance performances include the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara on January 29 and Velocity, the web performance conference from O'Reilly on June 23-24 near San Francisco.
Steve Souders
Chief Performance Yahoo!
Posted by stevesouders at 4:28 PM | Comments (0)
Last week, from the 5th to the 7th of December the London office of Yahoo! hosted the second internal European Frontend Engineering Summit. This meant that for three days everyone who works on the confusing bit of web development – the frontend – had a chance to meet up and listen to lots of talks about internal technologies in Yahoo! and best practice approaches to common issues.
People came from France, Germany, Spain and several colleagues from the US to see what the old world folks are up to. In addition to the Yahoos we also invited friends and colleagues from outside which meant that in total it must have been around 75 people filling the three meeting rooms in Yahoo’s office in the middle of Covent Garden, London.
Ex-Yahoo Simon Willison came around to deliver the keynote covering the pains, perils and joys of Comet as an upcoming technology.
There were too many talks to mention all, but we will try to upload the ones not covering internal information to slideshare and there’ll be several videos cropping up on the YDN theatre as soon as we are done editing them. Some topics that were covered:
You can find some of the slides on slideshare and we’ll keep putting them up there as they get cleaned up and converted.
Working in true English fashion, the summit ended with a pub quiz covering the geekiest ever questions (“Where would you find JSSS?”) and several drinks. All in all it was a great three days of knowledge sharing and we’ll see if we can repeat the experience next year. Photos are available on flickr and watch the YDN theatreer for more to come.
Chris Heilmann
Posted by cheil at 3:07 AM | Comments (0)
The minimized size of the YUI libraries is relatively small compared to similar AJAX frameworks, but maybe not small enough for the most demanding applications. If you need to keep the payload tiny, and perhaps not even download YUI libraries until absolutely necessary, Yahoo! Frontend engineer Chris Heilmann explains how to load YUI components on demand. He includes 68 slides from the recent Yahoo! Frontend Engineering Summit, as well as a nifty, ready-to-deploy, implementation example called unobtrusive Flickr badge v2.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 9:23 AM | Comments (1)
[12/7 Update: read an interesting Juku synopsis, by Yahoo! Frontend engineer Nicholas C. Zakas, on the YUI blog]
When you think of prestigious law schools, it's Harvard. Computer Science? Maybe MIT or Carnegie Mellon. When it comes to front end engineering though, Yahoo! Juku may be the best bet. Taught largely by our in-house front end pros, including YUI developers Nate Koechley, 
Nicholas Zakas, and Thomas Sha, and JSON point man Doug Crockford, Yahoo! Juku is a comprehensive, 3-6 month program to train professional front end developers. The curriculum includes advanced topics in JavaScript, DOM, HTML, CSS, YUI, performance, and accessibility.
Why train raw recruits to this degree? Well, in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Silicon Valley, it's hard-as-heck to find good front end programmers and web designers. Things aren't as crazy as in 1999, when many companies seemed to grab random people off the street to do front end development, but top talent is still scarce. The first class of 13 Juku graduates will toss their hats into the air on December 14th!
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 7:00 AM | Comments (17)
We're excited to announce the release of YSlow 0.9, Yahoo!'s web page performance analysis tool. There are two big features in this release. By integrating more tightly with Firebug's Net Panel, YSlow now finds non-DOM components such as Ajax requests and image beacons. And YSlow now crawls frames and iframes and analyzes those resources as well. There are several other new features and bug fixes described in the release notes including highlighting 404s, better detection of CSS expressions and JavaScript minification, and searching within the YSlow panel.
These features make YSlow stronger at identifying performance improvements for Web 2.0 applications. It's great that YSlow does even better performance analysis of pages, but be forewarned that your previous YSlow scores will drop if these new-found components exhibit bad performance characteristics. As mentioned in Rule 14 - Make Ajax Cacheable, some of the performance improvements that are readily applied to static content (far future Expires header, gzip compression, minification) can also be applied to Ajax responses. Whether it's Web 1.0 or Web 2.0, YSlow 0.9 helps you figure out what to fix to make your pages faster for your users.
Steve Souders
Stoyan Stefanov
Posted by stevesouders at 8:19 AM | Comments (6)
It might be a stretch to say that Yahoo's new Flash music player, Easylistener, "plays" the web, but it comes close. One feature that sets it apart from many other embeddable music players is that it not only can read standard playlist formats such as XSPF, M3U, and ASX, but it can search RSS and ATOM feeds, or inside any web page, for mp3 links. There is also a philosophy - one that comes from the love of music shared by Yahoo! Media Innovation Group developers William White and Joseph Magnani. As William White says in the announcement post:
Easylistener is different. It's not about promoting a particular product or service. It’s about embracing a new ideology – one of free-flowing music and ideas, shared via the web by real people who love music.
Easylistener adapts to both small and large spaces, so it can fit in tiny blog sidebars, thin banner spaces, or even take up a full page. You can easily customize and put Easylistener on your blog or web site by using the Easylistener code creator. Check out a few pages that already have it running: Swedelife, songs:illinois, Indie Music Filter, and My Old Kentucky Blog. Feel free to add Easylistener to your MySpace page. If you're on Facebook, the Music Blogs application uses Easylistener.
Jason Levitt
Posted by at 1:50 PM | Comments (1)
On 30st of November - St. Andrew’s Day - the European University Hack Team went from London to Scotland to pick the winners of the Dundee University Hack Program.
All in all the Scottish students came up with 18 hacks to woo both the judges and the professors - as the European University hack is a bit different than the US counterpart.
Contrary to the US University Hack Days, the European counterpart is part of the student’s course deliveries which means the hackers get a month time to create their hack. The reason is to give them time to delve deeper into unknown territory and technologies and integrate with their coursework.
Another difference is that the students don’t get a fixed time to present their hacks. Instead, each hack team stays with a computer and shows their hacks to all the other teams and the judges alike. The judges walk around looking at one hack after the other, making their notes and generally chat about the issues the students faced and the solutions they came up with. It is not as much about the hack but also about the steps and pains the students went through to get there in the end.
After three hours of going through the 18 hacks the judges deliberated for a while and came up with the following winners:
flY! is a Yahoo Messenger Plugin that allows for collaborative working on text documents. The team used the YUI Rich Text Editor to allow people to upload a file into Messenger and see and edit it in parallel.
The judges were especially impressed with the usefulness of this hack. It is based on a common problem of students: work on a text document together without getting out of sync. The team worked amazingly well together and complimented each other in delivering the hack. Just by looking at the hack we already came up with more use cases for it, for example taking notes in messenger conferences.
A very nice touch was that the team was genuinely shocked to have won and had to look at the name of the hack twice before standing up and receiving their prices.
Low Fat Mail is a Yahoo! Mail client inside a Messenger Plugin. Alex was annoyed with needing to open a browser every time he got a new email and wondered if there isn’t a way to read and write emails without leaving Messenger. He then used the BBAuth API to embed a light email reader and editor into messenger.
The judges really loved the idea of “scratching the developer’s itch” – solving a problem that the hacker found annoying – and the smooth integration of the two systems. Want to send an email to one of your contacts? Just click their name and start writing!
LinkSafe is a Yahoo! Messenger Plugin that took a problem that we all face: you are chatting with someone, he or she sends you a link and you have no clue if it is safe to click it or not. Is it something you shouldn’t look at in the office? Is it a phishing attempt? Is it a virus? LinkSafe helps you find out what is going on by analyzing links sent to you in a Messenger window and showing a preview of what the link’s target looks like in another window. It also flags up when the link is an executable file or archive and tells you to be wary.
The judges were impressed with the usefulness of the idea as it could be backed up by black and white lists and even be a child safety filter. Furthermore the interface was very smooth – it had a welcome screen explaining what it is, featured help information and generally worked like a charm.
The Last.fm widget is exactly what it says on the tin: a Yahoo! Widget that interacts with your last.fm behaviour. The widget recognizes your last played song or allows you to pick from several playlists, pulls in information about the band, the song and the album and displays it in the widget. It also allows you to browse other people’s playlists and get information about their music.
The judges were impressed with the amount of effort Gordon put into finding the right information, filtering the playlists to the data he wanted to show and the fun the widget brings to the user. You do not only listen to your favourite music, but also find out about the bands, see them and get information that would lead you to other music, concerts and people.
Of course all the hackers were winners in one way or another. Talking to the students we found out that a lot of them learnt about dealing with new languages and build something they wanted to have anyways. We also learnt about opportunities for us to improve documentation of our products and got the chance to connect hackers with third party companies to improve their APIs or explain why it would be a good idea to offer one – screen-scraping is just not fun.
With the lucky coincidence of the hack judging happening on St.Andrew’s day we grabbed the opportunity of the whole university partying and went to the student union to celebrate until the wee hours sharing more information, drinks and food.
We’ll more than likely be back next year and hope that more universities will see this program as an opportunity to give students something more to show on their CV than a great university degree once they go out into the market.
Chris Heilmann
Posted by cheil at 3:05 AM | Comments (3)
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