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

Working with Dialogs


In this section we'll add an AJAX-enabled Dialog box that will let visitors rate either of the images. Using Dialog is very similar in many ways to using the Panel. The underlying markup for Dialog follows the same SMF, and the constructors are also very similar.

One of the benefits of Dialog over Panel is that you can send and receive data asynchronously between the Dialog and an application running on the server. This makes use of all of the AJAX facilities provided by the YUI with very little intervention from us.

We'll also write the PHP code that will carry out the rating request. Like the last time we looked at an AJAX application with the YUI, we need a full web server environment for this example to work correctly.

By the end of this section, we'll have something that looks like this:

We have added a series of buttons, one underneath each image to enable our visitors to rate each image. When pressing that button, a Dialog pops up that is perfectly aligned to the...