The JavaScript Community is an interesting one. It grew up from a language which is unique in that, as Douglas Crockford1 says, no one bothers to learn before using. It's success as a language is indicative of how good a language it is, when you are able to get past the DOM and a few of it's less-well considered features. And that flexibility has been amazing in terms of innovation. Look at the plethora of modules available for the barely year-old NodeJS2, the dozens of script loaders and feature shims, and the many libraries for DOM abstraction like YUI3 and jQuery4.
It is, therefore, that I find it interesting that when Crockford was on Channel 95 Live for MIX 20116 yesterday, that when he suggested YUI, it responded in so much surprise and nascent criticism from the many, many jQuery proponents inside of the Microsoft Developer community. The comment is hardly a surprise, and not because the Crock-en7 works for Yahoo! He's not on the YUI project, and while I'm sure he participates in code reviews, his name does not appear in the commit history of either YUI2 or 3. He has, however, been critical of jQuery and it's creator, John Resig8, in the past, often making snide remarks about 'ninjas'.
I am not defending Crockford for his criticisms, or even seriously claiming that words from the mouth of Douglas should be taken as gospel. Admittedly, Douglas is a mythic figure these days, and he is very smart and has done great work creating and promoting best practices that have led directly to today's Golden Age of JavaScript.
I am also not trying to say "don't use jQuery", though I tend to think you shouldn't. My concern is the apparent bifurcation of the JavaScript community into 'people who use jQuery' and 'everyone else'. Now, part of the reason I am a bit anti-jQuery is because most people I know who are heavy users of the library, don't actually write much JavaScript, they mostly perform copy-paste programming of other people's code, and often don't develop much of an understanding of the language or it's abilities. Incidentally, they like it that way.
I had started JavaScript doing Pure DOM work, and it was everything that makes people hate JavaScript (when really, they usually hate the DOM, and it's inconsistent implementation). My needs, however, had been very basic, I wasn't even doing XHR at that point, so it worked. The JavaScript I wrote at that time also wasn't very good, looking back. Like Crockford, I didn't really bother to learn the language. I had done plenty of Java and C++ in my university work, and so JavaScript's visual familiarity led me to a lot of assumptions that were simply untrue.
Eventually, I needed a bit more. I required a date selection widget for a new project, and had also been reading a lot of the performance tips shared by Yahoo, which ended up leading me to YUI2. YUI2 felt quite a bit like Pure DOM, so it was familiar, and it provided a good set of high-quality widgets that did everything I needed, and quite a bit more. Though I started using YUI2, and read JavaScript: The Good Parts10, YUI2 definitely had some major weaknesses, which led to the negative attitudes many people seem to have to YUI to this day. The library was verbose, deciding what components you needed could be difficult, even when using the Configurator tool. And good luck writing your own widgets, it was time consuming and immensely repetitive due to the lack of any sort of standard framework.
But these weaknesses were all identified, and by the time I'd started using YUI2, YUI3 was already in it's design phase, and when it's first previews were released, I knew it was something special. It brought Loader, a tool I was intimately familiar with from YUI2, into the forefront making it simple to use. It defined a set of building blocks that promised to make widget creation, perhaps not trivial, but dramatically easier. It integrated CSS Selectors, the killer feature that everyone was so excited about in the jQuery world. It provided a plugin and custom event architecture that allows for easy composition and customization in a way that I hadn't seen in any other library.
To this day, many of the Widgets in YUI2 haven't been released in the Core of YUI3 (though many of Gallery11 counterparts of varying levels of functionality and quality), which a many people see as a weakness. However, this is similar to how other projects operate, where the UI Widgets are a different project from the internal core, and that's great. The fact is that there are more people building cool things for YUI3 than ever were for YUI2, and for those that have worked in other libraries, they almost all say that they find it easier and faster to build their code than in the other options available.
It is sometimes frustrating that the tools I want don't always just exist, or perhaps aren't quite right, but I have found very few problems that I haven't been able to prototype in at most a few hours of work using YUI3, including the first run of my attempt to re-think multiselect. Of course it takes longer than a few hours to polish the idea and make it shine, but rapid prototyping is immensely useful. Plus, for a well-polished widget that does, say, 75% of what I require, it is easy using the framework to extend the behavior I require without needing to directly modify the code for the core widget. There are exceptions to this flexibility, but they are definitely the minority in my experience.
I don't anticipate that this will directly buy any converts. I have shown no code. I have made comments that will likely offend someone. This post is more a collection of my thoughts on how I ended up using this particular library, and why, when I leave my current position, I'll continue to advocate for YUI wherever I end up. I am not so inflexible as to refuse other options, but I like to use tools that I know are a good idea, and not just ones that look like it12.
- http://crockford.com/
- http://nodejs.org/
- http://yuilibrary.com/
- http://jquery.com/
- http://channel9.msdn.com/
- http://live.visitmix.com/
- https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2011-March/013415.html
- http://ejohn.org/
- Resig is working on a book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninjas
- http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748/
- http://yuilibrary.com/gallery/
- http://boagworld.com/technology/dustin-diaz/