yuiblog.com Blog

Ryan Kennedy, lead engineer on Yahoo! Mail web services

Yahoo! Mail is more than an application now, it’s a platform. Learn how to use the new Yahoo! Mail Web Service for building entirely new applications on a powerful platform for sending, retrieving and searching mail.

Andy Baio, co-founder of Upcoming.org

Andy Baio, one of the co-founders of the iconic event database Upcoming.org, shares a unique and enlightening perspective on the role social networking plays in creating great applications for the emerging ecosystem.

Nate Koechley, author of the YUI CSS Reset, Fonts and Grids resources

CSS Reset, Fonts and Grids provide the CSS foundation upon which Yahoo! is building its future products — a foundation that allows for semantic, search-engine-optimized, accessible, progressively-rendered and font-scalable pages of significant variety and complexity. No single CSS solution is right for all developers and projects, but we’re sharing our recipe going forward in hopes that others will find it useful and that it will contribute to the ongoing conversation about how to build semantic, scalable web-applications. In this workshop, the author of this platform, Nate Koechley, will take you through a series of use cases in which Reset, Fonts and Grids are deployed in the solution of realistic layout problems.

Vince Maniago, Mirek Grymuza, and Chuck Freedman, Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Maps engineers

In this session we’ll explore Yahoo! Maps as the display platform for Yahoo!’s Local content offerings. Yahoo! Local’s lead developers will dive into the highlights of the latest Flash & AJAX Maps APIs and review numerous Local APIs like Local Search, Upcoming Events and the geocoder.

Douglas Crockford, Yahoo! JavaScript architect

The drama of web-services hacks often plays out on the canvas of the web browser as a dynamic assembly of information within the browser’s Document Object Model — a model not originally intended to support intensive GUI development. But the DOM API has proven both resilient and problematic in some surprising ways. Yahoo!’s leading JavaScript architect and JSON inventor Douglas Crockford will give you a introduction to the DOM and some valuable advice about how to avoid “hitting the wall” of performance in DOM-centric application development.

Matt Sweeney, author of the YUI Animation Utility and Dom Collection

Animation can be a powerful tool in the creation of learnable, intuitive rich interfaces. It can also add a degree of polish and smoothness that helps separate classy interfaces from also-rans. The YUI Animation Utility makes animation of DOM elements’ visual properties a snap, whether singly or in custom combinations. This workshop, led by the Animation Utility’s author, will introduce you to the core concepts and interfaces of this powerful component and its core classes.

Adam Moore, author of the YUI Event, Drag & Drop, Slider, & TreeView components

Event-driven programming in the browser requires, at the most basic level, a tool that normalizes eccentric cross-browser behaviors and helps to mitigate patterns that lead to memory leaks in some mainstream browsers. The YUI Event Utility is a rich toolkit for creating and managing DOM event listeners, refining event-handler access to event-object properties and methods, and for creating “custom events” that publish interesting moments in your own applications to subscribers throughout the page context. Adam Moore, the Event Utility’s author, will use this workshop time to work through some common use cases for the Event Utility’s core elements.

Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo! Head of Product Strategy

In our only plenary session of the day, Yahoo!’s Product Strategy chief Bradley Horowitz will discuss the ecosystem created by the diverse family of Yahoo web services. Stay tuned for a future blog post for more on Bradley’s talk.

Cal Henderson, Flickr Engineering Manager

Flickr became an icon of the new breed of web applications for many reasons, but one significant element of Flickr’s success was its API. Flickr welcomed developers into the fold and made it possible to harness the beauty and power of the collective photostream in diverse applications. Cal Henderson of Flickr will introduce you to the Flickr API and to many of the uniquely compelling opportunities it creates.

Matt Sweeney, Author of the YUI Animation Utility and Dom Collection

In the past, HTML was pushed to do things that it was not originally designed to do. Now that CSS and JS have evolved to the point that they can be cleanly seperated from the markup layer, HTML can return to simply describing the document’s content, letting CSS and JS control presentation and behavior. This allows the content to be self-sufficient; any HTML user agent can interpret the content if marked up correctly. This means that the same content can be presented in many different styles, with many different behaviors. When done correctly, this enables 100% access and simplifies testing and maintenance. When done incorrectly, users are blocked from accessing content, testing takes much longer, and maintenance time increases. This talk will focus on strategies for architecting HTML/CSS/JS systems to take full advantage of the power of each layer.

Todd Kloots, author of the YUI Menu Control

Menus are often the core navigation for a web site or application. As such they should be easy to use and accessible to all users regardless of how they choose to navigate: via their keyboard, mouse or with the help of a screen reader. The YUI Menu controls were designed with these goals in mind and make it easy to create application-style fly-out menus, customizable context menus, or navigation-style menu bars with (or without) existing markup and just a small amount of scripting. In this one-hour class, Todd Kloots, author of the YUI Menu family of controls, will cover the basics of the YUI Menu API and present several design patterns for developing navigation centered around accessibility and Progressive Enhancement.

Kent Brewster, Technical Evangelist, Yahoo! Developer Network

Ever wonder how those sweet little instant-search boxes work? Here’s your chance to find out! In just under an hour, you’ll create, test, and run your very own search application, powered by Yahoo!’s open Search APIs. (And if you’re not careful, you may learn something useful about structured HTML, CSS, and object-oriented programming.)

Things to Bring: a laptop, a text editor, a Web browser, and a connection to the Internet.

Things to Check Out Before You Arrive: the Search section on the Yahoo! Developer Network, and SpiffY!Search, one working example of this sort of thing.

Steve Souders and Tenni Theurer, Yahoo! Exceptional Performance

How do you build a lightning fast hack? Come meet the people responsible for providing a center of expertise to improve performance across all Yahoo! products worldwide. How much of the end user’s time is spent requesting the HTML document? What percentage of users have an empty cache on Yahoo! Front Page? What should you keep in mind to ensure your hack is optimized for performance? Find out the answers to these questions and more at this session.

Rasmus Lerdorf, Yahoo! platform architect and PHP creator

PHP has become amazingly popular due to its simple pragmatic approach to solving the web problem. As the web evolves and users demand even more dynamic web applications, the need for PHP keeps growing. People want richer web applications, they want AJAX, JSON and client-side magic to turn what used to be a series of linked pages into something resembling a desktop application.

In this talk Rasmus will cover the basic building blocks PHP 5 provides for building the backend of a rich web application and how to interact with client-side Javascript libraries and a variety of web services. There will be a heavy focus on performance with benchmarks and tips along the way.

Steven Peterson, author of the YUI Container and Calendar components

The age of pop-up blockers has, for many developers, meant the death of dialoging or messaging in context, requiring separate pages for gathering or displaying even the simple information. In-page panels and dialogs, built within the DOM, provide an alternative to pop-ups and can reopen the possiblity of contextual windows that either add information to the interface or gather additional information from the user. Two YUI components, Panel and Dialog (part of the Container family of controls), are dedicated to helping you address these implementation cases. In this workshop, Container author Steven Peterson will guide you through the fundamentals of creating, configuring and managing your Panels and Dialogs.

Jeannie Yang of ZoneTag and Gordon Luk, co-founder of Upcoming.org

ZoneTag: ZoneTag suggests likely tags for your photos, making it easy to add tags from your phone and even easier for you to find the photos later. The suggestions are based on tags made by you and your Flickr contacts in similar context, e.g. in the same location. Jeannie Yang of the ZoneTag team will give you an introduction to the ZoneTag service and how it might be useful in your own applications.

Upcoming.org: Using the Upcoming.org Events API, hackers can rapidly add custom events capabilities to their projects with a minimum of fuss. Working with events can be a complicated topic, so Gordon Luk, co-founder of Upcoming.org, will show a general approach and explain the fine points of events hack design.

Iain Lamb, Yahoo! DHTML/AJAX evangelism team, former Oddpost engineer

The past five years have seen the emergence of significant new trends in what it means to “hack” in a networked world. Paul Rademacher’s brilliant HousingMaps project broke new ground, reverse-engineering the Google Maps API and marrying it to Craigslist real estate listings, with a result so fundamentally useful that it transcended even the substantial virtues of the services on which it was built. It was a great moment for hackers, who had been mashing things up for decades; and the subsequent storm of mashups has brought the hacker back to center of the software-development fold.

In this new world of ecosystem-based hacking, however, a world of new skills and techniques is required. Iain Lamb, one of the original developers of Oddpost and now a member of Yahoo!’s elite DHTML/AJAX evangelism team, provides in this talk a guide to the new hacking landscape, including a top-ten list of literacies and techniques that we need to master to be full participants in hacking’s ecosystem age.

Thomas S. Sha, author of the YUI Connection Manager

From Oddpost to Google Maps, some of the most important milestones in web development over the past five years have shared a common ingredient: The use of in-page HTTP requests to create “persistent interfaces” that endure while the user interacts with, adds, and enhances data. Driven by non-standard XMLHttpRequest interface pioneered by Microsoft, these kinds of applications are now supported by all major browsers. The YUI Connection Manager is designed to help you take advantage of the power of asynchronous, in-page HTTP requests while insulating your application from some of the browser eccentricities that can arise when interacting directly with the various browser implementations. In this one-hour workshop, YUI team director and Connection Manager author Thomas S. Sha will give you a brief introduction to the Connection Manager and is use.

Allen Rabinovich of Yahoo!’s Flash platform team and Chuck Freedman of Yahoo! Maps

In this workshop, two of Yahoo!’s premier Flash developers will guide you through three sample Flash applications that utilize the Yahoo APIs. The three sample applications will include a Flash-based Yahoo Maps client (simplified), a Flickr Photo Viewer, and an Upcoming.org Event Viewer. For each of the applications, we’ll describe in detail what tools the you’ll need in order to leverage the Yahoo APIs; we’ll also explore how the API functionality integrates into the Flash environment. Note: The applications explored in this workshop will be written in ActionScript 2; some familiarity with the Flash technology and the language will be required.