UI Jane Doing YUI

Toby and I played around with Yahoos open sourced UI library YUI yesterday. It is a high level lib containing widgets, Ajax features and a lot of DOM scripting utilities that reminds pretty much of UI toolkits for desktop applications. While PrototypeJS with Scriptaculous are frameworks for coding JavaScript and Ajax in a clean way, YUI is more of a platform with ready-to-configure-and-use stuff.

The upside is that you can get fancy things like desktop application like widgets like sortable and re-sizable tables, expanding trees, and tabs with Ajax XHR data bindings up in a short time without writing much JS code. The downside is that you get a lot of code to send over the network. Although the library has whitespace compressed production files and fragments you can use if you only use some of the widgets, you get pretty soon up to 500kb or 1mb of client side scripts and style sheets. On the other hand, if you compare it to the other major high level web UI framework Dojo Toolkit you get a much more stable and standards bases solution that don’t crash and ordinary browser like Dojo does.

It is obvious that the YUI framework takes the web one step further down the road to replace the rich user interface desktop application without losing the interaction and user experience. That being said, we will not use it on our social network site because of the files size overhead, but continue to use PrototypeJS and to some extent Scriptaculous. But if I were about to build a web based application for an organizations internal use or for a stock broker firm, I would definitely give YUI a chance.