Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Overview of this book

The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls written in JavaScript for building Rich Internet Applications, across all major browsers and independently of any server technology. There's a lot of functionality baked into YUI, but getting to and understanding that functionality is not for the faint of heart. This book gives you a clear picture of YUI through a step-by-step approach, packed with lots of examples.YUI 2.8: Learning the Library covers all released (non-beta) components of the YUI 2.8 Library in detail with plenty of working examples, looking at the classes that make up each component and the properties and methods that can be used. It includes a series of practical examples to reinforce how each component should/can be used, showing its use to create complex, fully featured, cross-browser, Web 2.0 user interfaces. It has been updated from its first edition with the addition of several chapters covering several new controls and enriched with lots of experience of using them.You will learn to create a number of powerful JavaScript controls that can be used straightaway in your own applications. Besides giving you a deep understanding of the YUI library, this book will expand your knowledge of object-oriented JavaScript programming, as well as strengthen your understanding of the DOM and CSS. The final chapter describes many of the tools available to assist you the developer in debugging, maintaining, and ensuring the best quality in your code. In this new edition, all the examples have been updated to use the most recent coding practices and style and new ones added to cover newer components. Since the basic documentation for the library is available online, the focus is on providing insight and experience.The authors take the reader from beginner to advanced-level YUI usage and understanding.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
YUI 2.8 Learning the Library
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Seeking performance


Once everything works, we want to make it faster to improve the user experience. The first stop should be Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team site (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/) and, in particular, reading their recommendations at: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html.

YSlow

Those recommendations are quite easy to follow thanks to a tool the team has made and is available as an add-on to Firebug. You can actually have it loaded all the time and forget about it. When you want to try it you just click on its tab in the Firebug panel and let it try a page; it will provide you with an overall grade and a detail for each of the categories, with links to the particular entry in the team's site explaining what the problem is and how it can be fixed.

The website for YSlow reports improvements of 25% to 50% in performance. The best part of it is that we can incorporate many of its recommendations as a standard coding practice (for example, <style&gt...