One of the things that I have been resisting is to work on UI based on Javascript, also known as AJAX or Web 2.0
The downside of Javascript is it adds another layer of code. Think of the following common lingo in a Web 2.0 project. AJAX, HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL… and if you do data exchange of some sort, throw in EDI, XML etc.
I would have love to make things more simpler. And I still hold the belief that REBOL provides that capability; making computing easier.
However, I also have legacy applications that needs a breathe of new life. Customers wanted better sorting capability, ability to do filtering and more.
It is with this in mind, that I started looking at YUI again. I did not compare the whole forest of Javascript UI framework out there.
What I did was to define a set of rules and see if YUI meet the expectations. They are as follows:
- Does it has a strong developer base?
- Active and improved releases over the last 5 quarters?
- Is the framework adopted and used by huge companies?
Notice how little it got to do with technical issues? It is all about adoption.
On top of that, I would have say that YUI wins me over because Yahoo! offer free hosting of their YUI files. So, this give me the possibility to offload the files to their infrastructure which is much more scalable than what I have.
And, it is also released in a very friendly BSD license.
Wrapping up, below are screenshots of a before-after makover of one of my applications.
