• Detailed YUI 2.8.0 Rich Text Editor Article from Satyam and Packt: Satyam (Daniel Barreiro), as part of his new Packt volume YUI 2.8: Learning the Library, has published an extensive writeup on the YUI 2 Rich Text Editor on the Packt website.  You can check it out here.
  
• Excellent Coverage of the YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release on Sitepoint by @rssaddict: Louis Simoneau wrote up a nice review of the YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1 that we issued on July 26. Writes Louis: “A lot of [the new] features seem to have a common thread: HTML5 and mobile platforms. I’m sure that’s no accident, and it’s great to see more and better developer tools entering this space. As I said, there’s a lot more than just these features, so if you’re a YUI fan—or if you’ve yet to check it out—head on over and grab yourself a copy of the preview to play around with.”
  
• Dion Almaer on YUI 3.2.0’s Capability-based Loading: Dion Almaer has a nice article up on his personal blog about capability-based loading, a feature YUI engineer Adam Moore has added to YUI 3 and which is included in the first YUI 3.2.0 preview release. Dion reviews the state of capability-based loading in his article, starting with Google’s GWT and progressing to similar support in other JavaScript libraries. “And this brings us to YUI,” says Dion. “I was really excited to see some of the features in the YUI 3.2.0 preview release. Great stuff for touch/gesture support, but what stood out for me was ‘YUI’s intrinsic Loader now supports capability-based loading’. A-ha!” You can read Dion’s full report here.
• Pat Cavit Tutorial on Writing YUI 3 Plugins: Pat Cavit has a new tutorial up that details the creation of YUI 3 Plugins: “At their core YUI3 Plugins are a way to add new behavior to JS objects. It’s really just that simple. Going into it a little deeper you can explain the idea behind them as providing a framework-backed way to add new functionality & behaviors to host objects without the host needing to know anything about the plugins. Taking advantage of this means that you can add lots of functionality to your objects without requiring a lot of code. It’s another example of YUI3’s great support for modularity of code. Want your widget to accept flaboozulms? Write a plugin! Want your widget to support flaboozulms & flibberdybops? Write a plugin for flibberdybops & then use both the flaboozulms & flibberdybops plugins together. It’s a really powerful idea.” Check out his blog for the full article.
• Sample Chapter on YUI 2.8.0 Menu from Satyam’s New Book: Satyam has a new book out on YUI 2.8, and Packt has released a sample chapter from the new volume.  The sample chapter covers YUI Menu and can be downloaded from the book’s page on the Packt website.
• “Easy Sliding Menus” with YUI 3 by @andrew_cooke: Blogger Andrew Cooke writes the following in introducing his simple sliding-menu implementation based on YUI 3.1.1: “YUI 3 is amazing. It looks terrifyingly complex, but once you get into it,
  you can do complex things trivially. I use jQuery at work, and in comparison, YUI 3 feels like it was written by software engineers rather than people hacking web pages.” Check out his implementation of menuing here.
  
• Coverage of YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1 from @codepo8 on Ajaxian: Yahoo! Developer Network evangelist Christian Heilmann has a nice article up on Ajaxian talking about the July 26 YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1, our first public preview of the next YUI 3 release.
  
• YUI Test with the Jack Mocking Framework: Pawel Pabich has a nice writeup on his blog showing how he used YUI Test with the Jack JavaScript mocking framework to unit test some form-input validation and submission code. 
• Pivotal Tracker, an Agile Tracking System, Using YUI 2: This isn’t breaking news — it’s been around for a long time — but the Agile project management system Pivotal Tracker is heavily YUI  2-based, using the utilities suite, Container, and more.
  
• Ruby Gem for YUI Compressor from @mjijackson: Ruby hacker Michael Jackson has posted his Ruby gem for YUI Compressor on GitHub. From Michael’s project notes: “YUICompressor is a Ruby module that may be used to create compressed versions of JavaScript and CSS code quickly and easily using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library compressor. The module is essentially a wrapper around the YUI Compressor (a Java library) that supports two different modes of operation: shell and native. In shell mode the YUI Compressor library executes in a separate process. Code is piped into and out of this process using the system shell. This approach yields good performance and is the default for MRI and other Ruby versions that are not able to execute Java code. In native mode the compressor is invoked in the same process as Ruby. This is only possible when using YUICompressor on JRuby. With this approach, compression speeds dramatically improve because the system does not incur the overhead of invoking a separate Java process for each compression.” (Original source.)
  
• YUI is About.com’s Web Design “software Pick of the Week”: Jennifer Kyrnin writes for About.com: “Sometimes the easiest way to learn a web design technique is to borrow from someone else. Now, a lot of designers will get angry if you borrow their code, but Yahoo! has put together an entire library of scripts and CSS that you can use to create interactive websites. There are two versions of the YUI framework. Version 2 has been available since 2006 and is very robust and proven. If you’re working on sites that need interactivity, but also need to be very reliable, then this is the version you should use. Version 3 is what they call their “next generation” library. It hasn’t been as widely tested, and includes things that might be more cutting edge. But if you’re building sites that need more advanced (often beta) interactivity options, this is the version for you.”
  
• Thanks, Alessandro: We enjoyed this tweet from @avernet…
  
• Notes from @joedag32 on Building a Sortable List with YUI 3 Sortable: Writes Joe: “I’ve been working on building an application that will need an easy to use sortable list, that will fire off an event upon the list order changing. As simple as this sounds, it would require a lot of coding and cross browser testing to pull this one off with just javascript alone. YUI 3 allowed me to accomplish the above in just a few minutes. I’m not even going to try to guess just how much time it’d of taken me to do on my own. I made use of the Sortable Utility to make and unordered list sortable in just a few lines of code.” Check out his solution here.
• AjaxDump’s AutoComplete Widget List: AjaxDump includes YUI among its 10 great AutoComplete tools. Beyond the YUI 2-based AutoComplete documented on the site, be sure to check out the YUI 3 Gallery autocomplete component from Nate Cavanaugh and Eduardo Lundgren — as well as their “text-box list” widget, which implements a lozenge-style autocomplete interaction.
  

Ben Delarre emailed to let us know about his YUI 3-based implementation of an LED animation builder for a Burning Man 2010 installation:

I’ve managed to put this site, the animation editor, and a HTML5 Canvas based colour picker (which i’ll be contributing to the gallery just as soon as I can…), in just a few days using YUI 3 and PHP. (Its a little slipshod in places, and there’s much more to be done to make it better, but time is running out).

Illuminatrix is a project we’ve put together over the last few months for this years Burning Man festival… Its a 2D array of 16×16 ping pong balls, each of which contains an RGB LED that can be coloured any colour of the rainbow at any time. It will be displayed in the entrance to the More Carrot theme camp and to give it a bit of a twist we’ve decided to make it possible for everyone to contribute to the animations we’ll display on it.

Everyone, no matter what their ability, can create animations quickly and easily. You can either draw each frame individually by hand, or write JavaScript to generate the frames if you are of the technical persuasion (The “Code Help!” link gives a list of some useful functions as well as some example code).

Over the next few days we’ll be putting up pictures of the build, we’re already a good way into the hardware, but the deadline is fast approaching.

…Please pass [the link] around, we want to collect as many animations as possible before August 26th when we must head off for the Burn.

Hopefully, at least one YUI team member will be there to say hello to Ben at the event, and we’re all looking forward to seeing that HTML5 Canvas-based Color Picker in the YUI 3 Gallery.

• YUI 3-based Alloy UI Formally Announced at Liferay Conference: From the press release: ‘As part of this effort, Liferay also announced the immediate availability of Liferay Alloy UI. Developed in collaboration with Yahoo’s YUI project, Alloy UI provides a set of rich user interface components for quickly creating user-friendly portlets, widgets, and web applications. Alloy UI deals with the complexities of CSS, HTML, and Javascript, freeing developers to focus on business requirements and functionality. Alloy UI also helps solve some common cross-browser compatibility issues that typically consume project resources. The new library does not require a portal and can be used to develop components for any web application. Liferay Portal will standardize its front-end framework around Alloy UI, expanding the simplicity and capabilities of modern portal-based enterprise solutions. ‘Alloy UI represents a new capability for web developers to simplify the development of rich UIs,’ said Brian Chan, Liferay Portal’s creator and Chief Software Architect. ‘We are happy to have worked on this with the Yahoo team and feel it will be a great asset to help developers with their solutions.’‘ All Alloy UI components are now freely available to the YUI community in the YUI 3 Gallery.
• AutoFusion’s CarPrices.com Launches Using YUI 3.1.1: YUI 3 Gallery contributor Josh Lizarraga has been working with Autofusion Inc. on the new CarPrices.com project, built using a host of YUI 3.1.1 utilities and widgets.  Josh will have more on this project in a future YUIBlog post.
  
• Download Squad’s Erez Zukerman Advises JS Devs to Watch Crockford on YUI Theater: Writes Erez: “Douglas Crockford is a genius. Seriously – the guy is brilliant. He’s currently serving as Yahoo!’s chief JavaScript architect, he invented JSON (a widely used data interchange format), he’s part of the ECMAScript committee (the guys setting the JavaScript standard) and has a very broad understanding of the general history of programming languages and computer science. Recently, Crockford gave five talks about JavaScript as part of Yahoo!’s YUI Theater. These are all available for free, and they’re over five hours in length (more like six to seven hours in total, I think). What’s so cool about these talks is that Crockford really gives you a bird’s-eye view of the subject; the first hour is just history, and it’s really fascinating. It’s all over the place, starting with the Jackquad loom, through why we have both a Delete and a Backspace key on our keyboards, all the way to modern programming languages and JavaScript.” For more of Erez’s favorite JavaScript resources, check out his post; or head over to the Crockford on JavaScript page for Douglas’s latest videos (with many more filling the second column of YUI Theater).
  
• Congrats to Matt Snider & Friends at YUI 2-based Mint.com, Winners of a 2010 Webby: Congratulations to Matt Snider and the other outstanding frontend engineers at Mint.com for their well-deserved 2010 Webby award in the Financial Services category.  Mint has been YUI 2-based since the beginning, and Matt continues to be a big contributor to the YUI project. You can see Matt’s five-word acceptance speech over on YouTube.
  
• Ajaxian’s Dion Almaer Reviews Caridy Patiño Mayea’s Preload Gallery Module for YUI 3: Dion has a nice post up on Ajaxian reviewing Caridy Patiño Mayea’s Preload module for prefetching and caching assets, a YUI 3 Gallery entry that he wrote about recently on YUIBlog.
  
• Using YUI Grids with Movable Type (by @foxxtrot): YUI contributor Jeff Craig wrote about his experience converting a Movable Type blog to YUI 2 Grids: “So, as anyone who’s ever read my blog before, you’ll see that over the weekend I upgraded my blog template to use YUI Grids and YUI3 for the JavaScript. By switching away from the MT templates (or, the templates that were standard when I installed the first versions of MTOS 4), I was able to reduce the HTML pageweight by damn near half. The old templates were really div-heavy, and had a ton of extra markup. Mostly, the decision was driven by a desire to redo the visual feel of my blog, and I felt that I may as well rewrite under YUI Grids while I do it.”
• Nate Schutta Compares YUI and Dojo for IBM DevelperWorks: Nate Schutta writing for IBM developerWorks compares YUI 2.x and Dojo in a new post. While we’re focused more on the YUI 3.x codeline these days, Nate’s article has some useful guidelines for those thinking about JavaScript libraries and making a decision for their business or project. First — why YUI or Dojo?
  

  With so many excellent choices at your disposal, why would you consider YUI or Dojo? In a word: completeness. Unlike other solutions that involve additional libraries or plug-ins, Dojo and YUI have everything (and more) that today’s front-end engineer could want. While that is both a blessing and a curse, if you’re in the market for a one-stop shop for your Ajax needs, these are two powerful contenders. In addition to a wealth of JavaScript helpers and utilities, both offer top-notch widgets and controls—far beyond the limited palette of the standard browser.

  Nate’s advice on general library selection criteria is useful:
  

  • What do you want out of it? Are you looking for a complete replacement of nearly all UI elements on your page, or are you just looking for something to take a bit of the pain out of JavaScript programming?
  • How easy is the code to read? Despite massive improvements in documentation over the past few years, odds are you will have to dig into the code at some point. Before committing to a library, spend some time knee-deep in the source. Is it easy to understand, or does even the original author have trouble with it?
  • How good is the documentation? Clean and readable code can make up for less-than-stellar documents, but nothing helps you get started quite like tutorials and examples. Poke around the wiki or the website, and see what they have to offer. Are the examples clear and easy to follow? Does a quick Google search bring you to the proper part of their material?
  • What’s the community like that surrounds the library? Check out the mailing lists. Is there a lot of traffic? Are new people treated with respect or derision? Has the code been updated recently, or was the last release several years ago?
  • Can you get help? Although this is related to the previous bits about community, it’s always valuable to look around the development community and see who’s using what. Check out the job boards to get a sense of which libraries are showing up frequently on resumes.

• YUI 3.1.1 on NFL.com: NFL.com’s fantasy portal employs YUI 3.1.1 Overlay, Anim, History, and more.
  
• Free CMS Onpub Built with YUI 2: “Onpub is a PHP/MySQL web content management system. Onpub tightly bundles [the] Yahoo! User Interface Library [YUI 2] and CKEditor to enable the creation of standards-compliant, cross-browser, dynamic HTML websites. Onpub is designed to provide a base of well integrated components that have a proven track-record for helping web developers build websites that are easy to update, reliable and good looking.” (Original source.)
  
• The Big Question (with YUI CSS Reset): Paul Irish asked on Twitter if this was the first marriage proposal aided by YUI?  I’m not sure, but on some level having a reset of all quirky, inherited, upstream style rules seems like a good metaphor for what you do when you tie the knot.  Congrats to the couple; I’m assuming that Carrie said yes! (Original source.)
• Juego De Snake Built with YUI 3 by @jldorta: Caridy pointed out this nice snake game built on YUI 3.  Note the Twitter status rotator at the top of the page, also built with custom YUI controls (on the YUI 2 codeline). (Original source.)
  
• Matt Snider’s Mac-style Radio Button Preferences As a YUI 3 Module: Writes Matt: “One of my favorite UI features of the Mac OS, both OSX and the iPhone, is the way it handles radio inputs. Instead of having small, hard to click little round circle (like the web), there are large buttons that are obviously grouped by use of a connecting bar. The best place to see this is in the system preferences on OSX. Today’s article, introduces a widget that will do the same, by converting existing radio buttons into a Mac Preference Radio.”
  
• New Landscapes and Interiors Site Built by @joedag32 with YUI 2 JS and CSS Tools: Writes developer joedag32: “We…relied on the Yahoo! YUI Library to build the site as well. The site makes use of the following YUI components: CSS Reset, CSS Fonts, CSS Grids, Yahoo Global Object, DOM Collection, [and] Event Utility.  YUI really helped us to work faster and knowing that their library is used and tested by Yahoo! for A-Grade Browser support is a real time saver.” (Original source.)
  
• Bryon Wyly on Secure (YUI 2-based) Pie Charts for SharePoint: Bryon Wyly writes on endusersharepoint.com: ‘I have done several blogs on how to use the google apis to create dynamic pie charts of lists in SharePoint based on code written by Claudio Cabaleyro and published at endusersharepoint.com. Perhaps the biggest request I have heard is, “How can I use these charts on my secure intranet?” Since Google Apps is an image that is shipped back to you after sending the required data and since SSL is not an option, Google Apps are useless for lists that use secure and sensitive data…  A recent comment on my blog suggested I look at…YUI as a possible solution. After a few hours work, I was able to marry a YUI pie chart with the JQuerry SharePoint List parser and create a Pie Chart generated by your SharePoint List, that does NOT send you data outside the network.’  Check out his post for full details.
• Integrating YUI with Wicket: Mo Hammer has written up a tutorial on using the YUI Rich Text Editor with Wicket: “I was searching for a good rich-text editor for a Wicket project for some time, and eventually decided to use the YUI editor. It looks fairly nice, and can be configured quite well. Here, I’ll demonstrate how to use it with an HTML code editing button, as described in this example.”
  
• Selenium and YUI Buttons (by @adamgoucher): Adam Goucher has written a tutorial on how to work with YUI 2 Buttons in the context of Selenium tests.
• Nagare IDE Using YUI 2 (via @jlcarre): From the Nagare wiki: “Nagare IDE is a pure Web Integrated Development Environment dedicated to the
  Nagare Web framework. Using YUI, the Bespin editor, ajax and comet communications, it offers the browsing of your projects, the edition of the sources, the debugging of the raised exceptions and the consultation in real-time of the applications logs.” Nagare is “an Open-Source Python framework dedicated to web applications development. Its set of advanced features as continuation, direct callbacks registration, programmatic HTML generation, combined with its strong components model allow [you] to quickly and easily build highly complex and reusable applications.” (Original source.)
  
• Free YUI 2.x API Documentation Dictionary for Mac OS X 10.5 Users: (Note: I haven’t confirmed whether this works on more recent versions of Mac OS X.) From the product page: “In addition to using Dictionary.app it is also possible to find a definition through the ‘Look up in Dictionary’ context menu shortcut (works in Safari, Mail.app and any other application that supports it) or even from a Dashboard widget for Dictionary.”

Cory Mintz from Phanfare wrote in last week to tell us about their recent product launch, which is heavily based on YUI 2.8.0.

We just released our new web organizer yesterday… It is a full photo and video organizer built as a web application, using just about every YUI 2 component. We think it really blurs the line between desktop and web software.

Some notable features are:

• Using the Uploader, we let people organize and edit their photos as they upload.
• With the help of Drag and Drop and Menu, the thumbnail grid has all of the behaviors of an OS’s file browser. You can drag select, drag and drop reorder, multi-select using ctrl and shift, arrow between thumbnails, etc.
• The dynamic loading of the TreeView, let us lazy load user accounts with 100s of albums since they are hierarchical ( year -> album -> section ). This allows the page for an extremely large account to load just as fast as a small account.

I love the clean professionalism of the site and the extraordinary attention to detail in the UI. Feel free to tour the site — trial accounts are free and come populated with sample albums to give you a feel for what the site has to offer. Congratulations to Cory and the team for such a fantastic launch.

• Mich Cook’s YUI/YQL-based Module for Searching a Set of Docs:
  Yahoo! engineer Mich Cook developed a piece of YUI- and YQL-based code for the Yahoo! Developer Network website that he’s shared on their blog.  Writes Mich: “This block of code creates the YDN Rack module that supports searching within a set of docs. Previously, the only search functionality would scour the entire site for the terms entered. This module aims to provide contextual search within documentation so a user can more easily find something related to the docs currently being presented. We use a bunch of y! technology to do the heavy lifting and that’s awesome that we just have to manufacture the glue.”
• Geocoding/Wikipedia/YQL Tutorial from @codepo8 with YUI3 & Grids CSS: Christian Heilmann’s tutorial on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog ties together Wikipedia, YQL, and YUI 3.
  
• Noah Masterson (@noahvail) on the Virtues of YUI: Noah’s note about YUI: “The YUI library is an extensive collection of JavaScript and CSS tools. Basically, YUI provides everything a front-end web developer/designer needs, short of HTML and content.  Because Yahoo! uses YUI for its own applications, the code has already been tested at one of the most visited sites on the web, it has to work in all major browsers, and it’s likely to be supported and updated for a long time to come.There’s no other library that provides a combined JavaScript and CSS solution of YUI’s caliber, but even separately, I’d probably use its tools in my web projects. YUI’s CSS framework is the best I’ve tried (Blueprint is pretty nice, too). As for JavaScript libraries, picking one is often a matter of preference. For example, plenty of people love jQuery, which has a great community that creates plugins to extend the library. I prefer YUI, because it has so much included functionality and it mixes in seamlessly with the other JavaScript I write.  Finally, the genius of YUI isn’t just the library itself. Yahoo! has stocked the developers’ area of their site with excellent videos, examples, and documentation, making it easy to get started with the library — and providing a path to becoming an expert.” Thanks for the kind words, Noah.
  
• YUI 2 and 3 on StockTickr: StockTickr is a comprehensive investment tracking site built using both YUI 2 and YUI 3 elements.  Prominent touches include the navigation menus and DataTables. (Original source.)
  
• YUI 2 on Famzoo.com, a Site That Helps Parents Teach Kids About Finance: Bill Dwight wrote in to tell us about his YUI 2-powered project Famzoo, which “is a ‘Virtual Family Bank’ that parents set up to teach their children (ages 5-18) about personal finance. The parents own the bank, hold the real money, and set the ground rules. The children learn by doing, not by lecture.”  Bill has a video introduction to the site as well as an online slide deck. (Original source.)
  
• Moodle Updated to YUI 3.1.0, with Easy Support for 2.8.0: Users of the fantastic open-source education platform Moodle now have built-in access to YUI 3.1.0.  The developers have retained backward-looking support for YUI 2.8.0 as well.  Now, using YUI from within Moodle is this easy:

  M.mod_foobar.init = function(Y) {
      Y.one('#mycustomholder').set('innerHTML', 'Hello world');
  }

• “Cross-Browser Client-Side Storage for the Web” (re: YUI 2 Storage): Addy Osmani wrote up his thoughts on YUI 2 SwfStore, an underlying component that is used by the more comprehensive YUI 2 Storage Utility.  Writes Addy: “Hi guys. Today I’m going to show you how to do persistent Client-side storage that’ll work in any Web Browser without needing to use Cookies, Browser-Specific hacks or HTML5 – in other words, we’re going to store as much custom information as a site needs on a user’s system without needing to worry about compatibility issues. The reason we’re interested in doing this is because it has a huge potential to free up database resources if we don’t need to be saving information there – instead it can be readily loaded from our users computer through client-side storage. Even if you need to save data, you can always store it on your user’s system and log it to the server it at a later date in the week.”
• Matt Parker’s (@lamplightdb) YUI 2-based Diary Widget: Matt Parker of Lamplight Database Systems in the UK, who has authored some excellent Gallery components, posted a link to his work-in-progress Diary Widget for YUI 2.  Diary provides a scheduling interface with weekly views, filtering, drag and drop, and resize support.  Feedback is welcome.
  
• Objektorientiertes JavaScript Mit YUI 3: Mathias Schäfer of molily.de wrote an extensive tutorial on how to do Object inheritance using YUI 3. The German-language article shows the different ways you can use OOP in YUI 3 and even explains what’s going on behind the scenes. (Via Dirk Ginader.)

• YUI 2 on Discovery.com: Discovery Channel’s media-rich site makes use of YUI 2.8.0 Animation and Connection Manager, among other components.
  
• YUI 3/Node.js Work Reviewed by @dalmaer: “Oh, and YUI 3 is Looking Really Nice These Days”: Dion Almaer takes a look at Dav Glass’s YUI 3/Node.js work in Ajaxian.  Write’s Dion: “Oh, and YUI3 is looking really nice these days. A nice balance between a nice API + really nice looking widgets + a Crockford’s-worth of security care.”
  
• YUI 2 on RealCyclist.com: At my age, when the road gets steep you start looking for a lighter bike.  (Eating less may be less expensive, but it’s less fun.) And if you look on RealCyclist.com, you can shop on a site powered by a wide range of YUI 2 components.  On a related topic, BonkTown — a bargain site for cyclists — is also YUI-powered, and you can pick up items like shoe covers that make your feet more aerodynamic in a time trial.
  
• Free Test-tracker Cuanto Using YUI 2 DataTable, Tabs, Containers: Todd Wells wrote in to tell us about Cuanto: “Cuanto is a free tool for storing automated and manual test results, organizing them into logical groups, analyzing the nature of individual test failures, and using the resulting data to provide useful statistics. It uses the YUI 2 library extensively, including Container, Event, DataTable, Button and TabView.” (Original source.)
  
• Run a PHP Script in the Background Using AJAX [and YUI]: Mindraven has a post sketching out how to start PHP background tasks using Thomas Sha’s YUI Connection Manager.
  
• Spanish Language Introductions to YUI on DesarrolloWeb.com: The team at DesarrolloWeb.com have put together a series of four Spanish-language articles introducting web developers to YUI, YUI 3, simple events, and adding/removing CSS classes in YUI.  Their YUI manual “pretende ofrecer una serie de artículos teóricos y prácticos de las librerías YUI, un framework Javascript y CSS.”
• Y! Search Engineer @bretts Writes About His Outside Events Gallery Module: Brett Stimmerman of Yahoo! Search dicsusses his new Outside Events module for the YUI 3 Gallery.  Outside Events “allows elements to subscribe to DOM events that occur outside of them. An event occurs outside the subscriber if the target it is not the subscriber itself, or any of the subscriber’s ancestors.” (Original source.)
  

How much did we miss? Let us know via @yuilibrary or in the comments below (if you’re feeling retro).

Stay tuned: Rey Bango from Ajaxian stopped by Yahoo yesterday and recorded a video interview with YUI engineers Luke Smith, Satyen Desai and Adam Moore. That session, plus a talk with BayJax event organizer Gonzalo Cordero, should be running on Ajaxian in the coming week.

Sebastián Gurin dropped a note on the YUI Forums this morning inviting the community to take a look at his new yui4java project. The project, somewhat like Fybit’s Riatrax4JS, allows you to write web applications in Java while leveraging YUI 2’s component library. Sebastián calls the project experimental at this stage, but it’s already showing promise:

• complex image viewer, using YUI sliders and menu (and more);
• YUI widget demo, showing how to load (and the Java for loading) a variety of YUI 2 widgets

• YUI 3’s “quiet Revolution”, from @triptych: Writes Andrew Wooldridge, in reference to the YUI 3 Gallery: “With other libraries, you have to find and link to extensions yourself manage updates, and never know if the developer of the plugin you are depending on will stick with their code. With YUI 3 you know the code is open source, you can fork it if you need to, and since it’s hosted by Yahoo you know that it’ll probably stick around for some time. Not only that, but you know have a built-in almost App Store system for creating extensions! Say you have some interesting JavaScript effect, or some novel way to do something via js. You simply make it a YUI component and everyone who uses YUI 3 can include your code with essentially a single word (like “gallery-somefreakingawesomecode”). They don’t have to know who you are, you dont have to worry about hosting your code, and you get not only and instant audience, but with GitHub you get people who can help you make your code better.”
• Series of YUI 2 Video Tutorials on YouTube: This video series, which was made during the YUI 2.5.x timeframe, has recently come to YouTube and still contains some excellent introductory material on YUI 2.

  There appear to be about seven videos in the series: getting and exploring YUI, Ajax tutorial part 1, Ajax tutorial part 2, Ajax tutorial part 3, Ajax tutorial part 4, [not available] Ajax tutorial part 5, Ajax tutorial part 6.

• YUI 3 on MSN Glo: Rodrigo Castilho told us about MSN’s use of YUI 3 on the Glo website.  Animation, IO, JSON and a series of custom modules are at work on the site. (Original source.)
  
• MSN Wonderwall Using YUI 2: Celebrity news, photos and gossip site MSN Wonderwall makes heavy use of YUI 2 and is loading YUI 3 — perhaps in preparatin for a transition.  Great to see good use of YUI at MSN.
  
• MarkoutJS — a Templating API Based on YUI 3 from @ericf: Eric Ferriauolo of OddNut Software in Boston has released MarkoutJS, a templating API for creating DOM elements.  MarkoutJS is built on YUI 3 and is part of the YUI 3 Gallery, so as of the 3.1.0 release you can use it directly from the use() statement by requesting the gallery-markout module.
  
• YUI 3 Event Delegation Tutorial from @kickballcreativ: Lauren Smith of Kickball Creative, author of the excellent YUISand module in the YUI 3 Gallery, has posted a tutorial on using YUI 3’s intrinsic support for event delegation — a powerful performance-enhancing strategy.
  
• Andrew Bialecki Updates the Effects Module in YUI 3 Gallery: Andrew Bialecki, after winning the YUI 3 Gallery contest with his Effects module, isn’t resting on his laurels. The first significant update to the component has already been posted. Full docs for the project are up on Andrew’s site.
  
• Matt Snider Writes About His Radial Menu Module in the YUI 3 Gallery: Writes Matt: “The RadialMenu gallery component is finished and available on GitHub at http://github.com/mattsnider/yui3-gallery/downloads. The latest version of the RadialMenu improves on the previous two articles by having the RadialMenu and RadailMenuPanel objects extend Overlay. By using the overlay component, RadialMenu can leverage the knowledge and experience that went into developing overlay, and we remove the need to mask the page with an invisible div.”
• YUI 3-based Carousel Implementation on IPRD.org.uk: The world of YUI 3 widgets has another entrant in the form of a new carousel component developed for IPRD website in the UK. The developer has begun the process of submitting the widget to the YUI 3 Gallery.
  
• JYUI from @kickballcreativ — Add YUI 2 and 3 Modules to Any JQuery Project: Lauren Smith of Kickball Creative, author of the YUISand plugin in the YUI 3 Gallery, has created a follow-on project to YQuery (which allows you to load and use jQuery from within YUI 3).  The new project is jYUI, which, as you might suspect, does the reverse — makes YUI 3’s broad assortment of modules available to you easily within any jQuery-based project.  As usual, Lauren has numerous examples up on his site.
• Using Configuration Groups in the YUI Loader, Via @kickballcreativ: Lauren Smith of Kickball Creative has posted a tutorial on using configuration groups in Adam Moore’s YUI Loader.  Writes Lauren: “First thing to get out of the way is that this is not a sexy topic of discussion. Nothing is going flying across the screen doing all sorts of killer fx. However, if loading your site as efficiently as possible gets you excited then read on. The YUI loader is extremely powerful and the config settings that are provided to us are extensive and allow us a lot of flexibility over how we handle the processing of our pages.”  Check out the tutorial for full details.
• “Photos Around You”, a YUI 3.1.0 Mashup by Eric Ferraiuolo: Eric Ferraiuolo is a stalwart member of the YUI community (he spoke at YUICONF 2009), and pairing him with one of the web’s most visually interesting API’s, Flickr, was bound to result in good things.  His “Photos Around You” mashup brings together some of the best characteristics of YUI 3.1.0 along with the visual richness of Flickr and the emerging web/geo connection to make for a fun and entertaining exploration. (Eric wrote more about the project on his blog, and Rey Bango covered this project on Ajaxian.)
  
• Anthony Pipkin’s Growl-style Notifications for YUI 3: Developer Anthony Pipkin is working on growl-style notifications for YUI 3; he’s got a demo up, along with an alternative skin. (Original source.)
  
• YUI in Use on Seattle Sunglass Co. Website: A YUI user wrote in to tell us that Seattle Sunglass Co.’s website is among the many ecommerce sites powered by YUI 2 — in this case, 2.8.0.
• Congrats to Our YUI-using Friends at Alfresco on a Great Year: Congratulations to the team at Alfresco, heavy users of YUI 2, where they continue to demonstrate that the virtuous cycle of building open source solutions on open source foundations can lead both to happy customers and to solid revenues.
  
• Todd Kloots’s YUI 2 Menu on BowlingBall.com: If you’d asked me five years ago whether DHTML menus were intersting, I would have said — “Um, not so much.” But after watching Todd Kloots, now at Twitter, spend a couple of years perfecting the YUI 2 Menu Control, it always makes me happy to see his elegant menu system powering the navigation of sites across the web.  Bowlingball.com is a site that makes good use of Todd’s work to drive its primary menu-nav system across the top of the page.
  

In the meantime, here are some other developments we’ve noted recently. Let us know what me missed in the comments or via @yuilibrary on Twitter.

• AlloyUI Available in Preview — Huge Complement of YUI 3-based Components: Nate Cavanaugh and Eduardo Lundgren of Liferay have been working for the past six months on a new set of UI components (and a few utilities) based on YUI 3.  They’ve debuted the project at AlloyUI.com and Nate introduced the project on his Liferay blog.  We visited with Nate and Eduardo at Yahoo recently and were impressed by the scope and quality of the work — a fantasitc new resource for the YUI community.  We’re looking forward to seeing this content make its way to the YUI 3 Gallery in the near future.
  
• TweetBracket — a Beautiful YUI 2 Carousel Implementation: We love to see creative uses of YUI, and TweetBracket is stellar in this regard.  TweetBracket is a “wisdom of crowds” NCAA tournament application that lets you vote on who you think will win matchups between tournament teams; it ties into Twitter by allowing you to tweet your votes.  The headline here for YUI users is the YUI 2 Carousel implementation that provides the main navigation between games — beautifully skinned, and very intuitive.  TweetBracket is based on YUI 2.8.0. (Original source.)
  
• Carlos Bueno’s YUI 3/jQuery “Rosetta Stone”: Yahoo! alum Carlos Bueno is back with another outstanding technical reference — a cheatsheet for people making the transition from jQuery to YUI 3 (or vice versa).
  
• YUI 2 AutoComplete and More on StarwoodHotels.com: Starwood Hotels has a nice, lightly styled YUI 2 AutoComplete implementation driving their “Enter Destination” field on their main page.  The developers are bringing in the data with YUI 2 Connection Manager and animating the suggestion container with YUI 2 Animation, as in this example that ships with 2.8.0.
  
• YUI 3-based “Twitter Trends” Mini-app by @ericf: Eric Ferriauolo of Oddnut Software, one of the most insightful members of the YUI community, has posted a mini-app using YUI 3 to slice up Twitter trends by time period.  The app is based off the preview YUI’s upcoming 3.1.0 release and uses Slider, Cache, DataType and Luke Smith’s JSONP module from the YUI 3 Gallery.
• Semih Turgut is Working on an Alternative Skin for YUI 2: Based on the default Sam Skin, Semih’s work tones down the color saturation and adopts a more earth/slate color palette.  He says he’s about a month away from having it ready to share — if you like the work, drop by the forum and let him know.
  
• Professor Greg Wilson Covers the YUI 3 Gallery Contest: Professor Greg Wilson of the University of Toronto joins the call to action for the YUI 3 Gallery contest.  Writes Greg: “Contributing to the YUI 3 Gallery is easy if you know some JS and CSS. Several dozen modules already to serve as code-structure models, and there are many reasonably-scoped ideas for new modules that could be completed within a couple of weeks. The prize is fantastic — JSConf has some of the best speakers in the industry, and this year’s lineup is filled with compelling speakers. Win or lose, contributing a visible, enduring piece of code to a well-known OSS project is a fantastic learning experience and an activity that looks great on your resume going forward.” Kay at the University of Washington in Seattle is covering this as well.
  
• YUI 3 and YQL on Choip.me: Joseph Bowman’s Disqus/Twitter mashup Choip.me is using the latest YUI 3.1.0 preview along with YQL in its mission to make Twitter more conversational.
  
• Wayne John on YUI 2’s Reset CSS: Wayne John wrote up his take on YUI’s Reset CSS approach: “What the Yahoo YUI 2 Reset CSS file does is level everything to a known starting point.  When you include the Reset CSS file in your markup, you are essentially saying, “Alright all you browsers of the world, we’re all going to start on the same page, hear me?”.  This helps by allowing the developer to start at a known point, and not from one browser having 5px margins from the start, while another may start with 0px.  By including the Reset CSS, every browser will start with 0px (for example), giving us a great place to start from as developers and designers.”  Check out his post for more.
• YUIG, a GUI for YUI Compressor: Raúl Ferràs has released YUIG, an application for Windows that puts a graphical user interface in front of YUI Compressor.  Other interesting projects in the same vein include RefreshSF’s web-based interface and Dan Wellman’s YUI Compressor Automator Windows application.
• Unicode + YUI 3 “stealth Tweets” Demo from @gaarf: @gaarf posted this gist that he describes as a stealth tweet creator — and an effective one.  Using a unicode transformation function (from Alan Wood), the demo swaps out characters for their circled/double-circled unicode equivalents (or wraps them in parentheses).  The result is a readable tweet, but one that may not show up in string-matching searches. (Original source.)