3.5.0pr2 is available

We deployed the second 3.5.0 preview release right on time, celebrated for a couple minutes, then went back to work on PR3, which will be the gating preview before 3.5.0 GA in mid-March.

But we’ll stop to take a breath and highlight some of the changes in PR2. You’ve read the short list on the release blog post, so join us for a little more detail and probably some live tinkering.

As is the case with all preview releases, we’re eager to get your feedback and any bugs you find. Or if you’re note yet convinced to give it a try before the GA, maybe we can convince you.

Time & Details

We’ll be online on Thursday from 10am to 11am PST.

Join the Meeting

Recording

The recording is available in the YUILibrary YouTube channel.

YUI 3.5.0 Preview Release 2 has been released to the developer community for feedback and testing. It is now available on the Yahoo! CDN at yui.yahooapis.com/3.5.0pr2/build/yui/yui-min.js, or as a download if you plan to test it locally.

The rollup of 3.5.0 changes introduced up until PR2 is available on our GitHub Wiki. You can also review the list of tickets that were resolved in this release.

Work-in-progress user guides and API docs for 3.5.0 can be found on our staging site, but beware that these docs may be incomplete or even broken, since this is where we test new stuff. Official docs for the latest stable release can always be found on our production site, yuilibrary.com.

Some highlights in this release include:

• New HTML5 File Uploader with Flash fallback
• Major DataTable refactor. If you’re a DataTable user, please read the user guide for details about API changes.
• CSS Button, Button and ButtonGroup modules
• Many bug fixes and feature enhancements for App Framework components

To file bugs against this release, please visit our bug tracking system. If you’d like to provide input on these and future modules, the ongoing discussions on various topics relating to the 3.5.0 release are happening on our GitHub wiki.

We will release YUI 3.5.0 GA in mid-March. Happy testing!

NFL.com’s Ryan Cannon (@rcanine) joined us at YUIConf 2011 to share the story of why NFL.com chose YUI over jQuery, how they migrated a large codebase from Prototype to YUI 3 on a tight schedule, and how they use YUI to create websites and mobile apps for one of the world’s most popular sports leagues.

Links

• View in HD on YouTube
• Slides
• Full YUIConf 2011 Playlist on YouTube

In this talk from YUIConf 2011, YQL engineer Paul Donnelly demonstrates the features of the Yahoo! Pipes editor and explains how you can use Pipes and YQL to power your web apps, create mashups, and more.

Links

• View in HD on YouTube
• Full YUIConf 2011 Playlist on YouTube

YUI 3.5.0 Button (and more?) update

Welcome to 2012! We’re starting this year off easy, talking about buttons. Y.Buttons to be exact. Derek Gathright will be joining us to give the latest details on the classes and modules for creating YUI style buttons, what’s available today and where, what’s coming up, and reviewing some of the unique challenges of creating something as simple as a button.

If we have time in the hour, we might talk about DataTable’s development status as well, since that’s consuming most of my time and attention these days.

Time & Details

We’ll be online on Thursday from 10am to 11am PST.

Join the Meeting

Recording update

There were technical complications this week (aka, Luke’s lack of AV skills), and the recording wasn’t salvageable. Derek was kind enough to share his talking points, with links, in this gist: https://gist.github.com/1599415.

In this talk from YUIConf 2011, Jeff Burtoft (@boyofgreen), Lead Frontend Engineer at USAA, shares what he’s learned about building performant and scalable cross-platform mobile web apps using YUI. In the course of the talk, Jeff reveals some of the pitfalls of dealing with device limitations — particularly when building native-wrapped web apps that run in web views — and explains how he and his team worked around them using YUI.

Links

• View in HD on YouTube
• Full YUIConf 2011 Playlist on YouTube

In this talk from YUIConf 2011, Meebo engineer and YUI contributor Jeff Craig (@foxxtrot) reveals everything you’ve always wanted to know about the YUI Loader but were afraid to ask. This is a must-see for anyone doing performance-critical work with YUI 3.

Links

• View in HD on YouTube
• Slides
• Full YUIConf 2011 Playlist on YouTube

YUI 3.5.0 PR1

YUI 3.5.0 PR1 is now available! This is the first of three Preview Releases for 3.5.0.

For this Open Hours we’ll be highlighting what’s in PR1 and discussing how you can get involved to make sure 3.5.0 is rock solid. We’ll also be asking for a show-of-hands from the awesome developers who’ve already started using 3.5.0 PR1 (which is on the CDN). Come Thursday, don’t get caught with your hand down :)

Also, the YUI Library Staging site has been updated with the newest user guides and API docs, and in response to the feedback from the last Open Hours, we’re now using our GitHub wiki to track ongoing development discussions.

Time & Details

We’ll be online on Thursday from 10am to 11am PST.

Join the Meeting

Recording

The recording is available on the YUILibrary YouTube channel.

Since the initial release of the App Framework in YUI 3.4.0, we’ve been astonished by how quickly it’s been adopted. In projects large and small, both long-time YUI users and those who are completely new to the library have been enthusiastically using the App Framework’s MVC components and providing great feedback and bug reports. Thank you!

In YUI 3.5.0, the App Framework will receive lots of bug fixes and some major enhancements. Eric Ferraiuolo covered many of the upcoming changes in his fantastic YUIConf talk, but we want to highlight them here as well so you’ll know what’s coming and what you should prepare for if you plan to upgrade App Framework-based code from 3.4.x to 3.5.0. These changes are already in YUI 3.5.0 PR1, which was released today, so now’s a great time to start testing them.

Y.Controller is now Y.Router

“Controller” was a silly and confusing name for a component that really concerns itself more with URL-based routing, especially given the more traditionally controller-like role that Y.View plays. We’ve decided to bite the bullet and rename the Y.Controller class to Y.Router in 3.5.0. Y.Controller will become an alias to preserve backwards compatibility, but this alias will eventually be removed, so you should update your code to refer to the new name.

New route handler signature

The method signature for route handler functions in Y.Router has changed slightly to make it more similar to Express and to make Router’s API more natural when used on the server (a feature we’re currently working on for 3.5.0).

Previously, a route handler function received two arguments: req (a request object) and next (a function). In 3.5.0, route handlers will receive three arguments: req, res (a response object), and then next.

For the sake of backwards compatibility, the new res argument is also a function that behaves exactly like next, so old-style route handlers that expect next as the second arg will continue to work fine in 3.5.0. However, this compatibility shim will eventually be removed, so don’t wait too long to update your code.

Some properties are now attributes

We experimented with a not-entirely-YUI-like style of using properties for configurable options in the App Framework components in 3.4.0, but this turned out to be a little confusing and more than a little limiting, since properties don’t benefit from change events, setters, and validators like attributes do. So in 3.5.0, we’re converting many of these properties to attributes.

Unfortunately, this change is not backwards compatible, so existing code that uses Y.Controller (now Y.Router) or Y.View may need to be updated. Specifically, Y.Router’s html5, root, and routes properties are now attributes, and Y.View’s container, model, and modelList properties are now attributes as well.

In addition to this, Y.View’s container attribute now treats string values as CSS selectors used to find nodes on the page. In 3.4.x, it assumed a string value represented raw HTML that should be converted into a node. To get the old behavior, just change your existing HTML string values from '<div>foo</div>' to Y.Node.create('<div>foo</div>').

Documentation for 3.5.0 PR1

Work-in-progress documentation for these changes and other changes in YUI 3.5.0 PR1 can be found on our staging website. Here are some links to relevant staging docs that include information on App Framework deprecations in 3.5.0 and details about how to upgrade your code:

• Router
• View

Note that the content at stage.yuilibrary.com reflects ongoing work in progress and may be incomplete or even occasionally broken as we test new stuff. You’ll always find the docs for the latest stable release at our production site, yuilibrary.com.

What else is new?

In this blog post I’ve summarized the important deprecations coming to the App Framework in 3.5.0, but there are also lots of feature enhancements and under-the-hood bug fixes. For a complete list of App Framework changes in 3.5.0 PR1, consult the HISTORY file.

Also, look for a blog post from Eric soon about Y.App, an awesome new high-level component of the App Framework that wraps up URL-based routing and view management into a single easy-to-use API that’ll get you from zero to a working application in no time.

We hope you love the preview release, and we’d love to hear from you! You can send us feedback in the forums, in a bug report, on Twitter, on the #yui IRC channel on Freenode, or just chime in here with a comment.

YUI 3.5.0 Preview Release 1 has been deployed for testing and feedback from the developer community. You can find it on the Yahoo! CDN at yui.yahooapis.com/3.5.0pr1/build/yui/yui-min.js, or download a zip file if you plan to host it yourself.

The rollup of changes introduced in PR1 is available on our GitHub Wiki. In addition, you can review the list of tickets that were resolved in this release.

Work-in-progress user guides and API docs for 3.5.0 can be found on our staging site, but beware that these docs may be incomplete or even broken, since this is where we test new stuff. Official docs for the latest stable release can always be found on our production site, yuilibrary.com.

More changes will be introduced in the upcoming preview releases of YUI 3.5.0; some of them are currently in developers’ own branches and are available for initial review via the following pull requests:

• New DataTable Architecture and Implementation
• New Button module

To file bugs against this release, please visit our bug tracking system. If you’d like to provide input on these and future modules, the ongoing discussions on various topics relating to the 3.5.0 release are happening on our GitHub wiki.

If all goes according to plan, we hope to release YUI 3.5.0 PR2 on January 30th, 2012. Happy holidays!