
Response to John Resig’s comments about YUI - shawndumas
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2010/11/03/response-to-john-resigs-comments-about-yui/
======
weego
I evalutated JavaScript libraries for my current employer and obviously had
jQuery and YUI as two of first on the list before I even did any real
research.

For me, YUI ended up being too much like a solution architected and run by
people coming "down" to JavaScript from more high level languages, whereas
jQuery still works like a framework built by people who use JavaScript a lot
and wanted a way to make their lives easier (though granted the jQ UI stuff is
a bit off the mark). Immediately even the way the YUI documentation hub is
written and managed put some of our more designery-developers off and once
they felt intimidated by that then their next reaction is to come up with
reasons why they don't want to use it, or other developers end up wasting time
supporting them.

I thought YUI would make a more suitable choice for us in terms of the
approach the YUI team expect YUI code to be architected and written, but if
the entire team can't get behind it then rather go with something less
architected and at least have everyone on board from the start.

jQuery is popular because it gave a solution to "I was always told to avoid
JavaScript but now everyone is using it, how do I get into it easily?". YUI
solves the slightly different issue of "I want to base my entire codebase off
a well architected JavaScript core that I can extend in a way that my OOP
front end engineers will feel at home with".

Sabre wrattling not required.

~~~
plaes
To me, YUI smells like a big bloated "Enterprise software" while JQuery is
small and "Made by hackers".

I have used them both and when I run into bugs, the ones in YUI are still open
and waiting for the time until their "paid" developer has time to fix it..

------
adolph
_jQuery is great for smaller sites and it’s easy for anyone to pick and use,
which is why there is such a strong designer community...but I wouldn’t want
to use it to create the Yahoo! homepage. For scalable web applications, YUI
really excels._

I'm curious: what about YUI lends itself to scalability?

~~~
cageface
I took that to mean scalability in the sense of UI complexity. Building
something like some of the denser Yahoo pages in jQuery would be painful.

However, most of the YUI-based stuff I've seen struck me as overly complex and
slow and heavyweight, like Ext/JS. If you want to build something that looks
and feels like a desktop app those libraries are probably the right choice but
I almost always prefer something lighter and cleaner in a web UI.

~~~
kaylarose
That's exactly my experience as well. I recently worked on two "enterprise
rich web apps"(I hate that term) that were desktop-like.

App A: the UI was mostly composed of HTML glued together with JQuery
components, with a custom Model/Controller implementation (similar to
Backbone.js) for the data. The view did have a lot of glue, but the data
separation ended up a lot cleaner, and was easier for designers to maintain
(HTML/CSS).

App B: Was taken over from another team that used ExtJS. App B, had full UI
without much effort, but ended up with a lot more cruft and direct view/model
dependencies.

Plus the ExtJS documentation is terrible.

------
DjDarkman
YUI2 was the first JavaScript library I started with, then I got into a
project where I found jQuery code. At first I thought that jQuery's selector-
centric method is weird, but I quickly found out that I was wrong. The thing
that I love in jQuery is that it feels like HTML and JavaScript. YUI2 is an OO
framework and a good one, but to me jQuery feels more like the web.

I seen little YUI3 but as I seen it's kind of shifted into a more functional
style than YUI2.

