Kudos to Yahoo! For The Yahoo! User Interface Library

A few weeks ago Yahoo! released their Yahoo! User Interface Library, a set of JavaScript files with foundation classes to deal with events (YAHOO.util.Event) and the XMLHttpRequest object (YAHOO.util.Connect), as well implementations of three widgets: a calendar, a slider, and a tree view.

The JavaScript is nicely commented and HTML documentation is generated from the source code with JSDoc, which does a similar task for JavaScript as Javadoc does for Java.

My congratulations to Yahoo! goes not for having created such a library, but for releasing it under an open source license (BSD). Sure, Yahoo! is getting a lot of free QA this way. Having so many external developers look at what they are doing is certainly an additional motivation for the team, and getting external developers to use their library drives standardization which is a good for everyone. Those are all benefits for Yahoo! but I am sure that leading to this decision there were those at Yahoo! who were thinking that it would be better to keep code for themselves. So kudos to Yahoo! for making the right decision and open sourcing their JavaScript library. Here are Orbeon we are already looking at the library and considering to use it in future versions of PresentationServer.