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

Chapter 12. Drag-and-Drop with the YUI

I remember the excitement I felt after drag-and-drop operations on web pages first became possible with the advent of DHTML and the release of capable browsers. The feeling soon wore off, it was messy, it took an awful lot of code, and browser support was haphazard at best.

Now thanks to the YUI, that same giddy feeling of joy has returned, and this time I can't see the bubble bursting so quickly. Drag-and-drop with Yahoo!'s library is extremely easy to implement. It is completely clean, and cross-compatible with the entire spectrum of A-grade browsers.

We've already had a little exposure to the usefulness of drag-and-drop in previous chapters, as this is the mechanism that allows panels and dialogs to be dragged around the viewport or columns in a DataTable to be resized or reordered (provided the corresponding attributes are enabled). In this chapter, we're going to examine this utility in more detail, we will see:

  • How to allow any element on the screen...