Yahoo has opened its new homepage to developers to build
applications to be featured in the Yahoo homepage gallery; the company
also has released a new version of the Yahoo User Interface, YUI 3.0.
In a Sept. 29 blog post about the homepage development, Xavier Legros, director of products for the Yahoo Application Platform, said:
"Now, you can build apps that run on the new Yahoo homepage, which
gets over 330 million unique visitors per month worldwide. By building
apps, you can drive traffic to your site, acquire new users, and
increase awareness of your brand. You can also display ads and make
money through virtual goods. We’re working on an array of additional
developer monetization opportunities – these will be available soon."
Moreover, Legros said there are nearly 400 applications available
for Yahoo homepages around the world. And homepage apps are built with
the Yahoo Application Platform (YAP), which enables developers to build
and distribute an application that any Yahoo user can install, Legros
said.
"There’s a universe of apps just waiting to be built for Yahoo! users worldwide," he added.
Meanwhile, Yahoo also announced the general-availability release of
YUI 3.0.0, which updates YUI 3’s core infrastructure which includes
YUI, Node and Event) and its utility suite, including Animation, IO,
Drag & Drop and more.
In a blog post on YUI 3.0, Eric Miraglia, a Yahoo engineer, said YUI 3 is the first ground-up redesign of YUI since 2005.
Miraglia also said YUI 3.0 delivers several new and enhanced features, including:
1. Selector-driven: YUI 3 is
built around one of the lightest, fastest selector engines available,
bringing the expressive power of the CSS selector specification into
actions that target DOM nodes.
2. Syntactically terse: Without
polluting the global namespace, YUI 3 supports a more terse coding
style in which more can be accomplished with less code.
3. Self-completing: YUI 3’s
light (6.2KB gzipped) seed file can serve as the starting point for any
implementation. As long as this seed file is present on the page, you
can load any module in the library on the fly. And all modules brought
into the page via the built-in loader are done so via combo-handled,
non-blocking HTTP requests. This makes loading the library safe, easy
and fast.
4. Sandboxed: YUI modules are
bound to YUI instances when you use() them; this protects you against
changes that might happen later in the page’s lifecycle. (In other
words, if someone blows away a module you’re using after you’ve created
your YUI instance, your code won’t be affected.)
"The code we’re shipping today in 3.0.0 is the same code that drives
the new Yahoo! Home Page, and it goes out with confidence that it has
been exercised vigorously and at scale," Miraglia said. "The team is
thrilled to be sharing it with you today for the first time in a
production-ready release."
In the post, Miraglia also provides step-by-step instruction for
developers to get their first YUI application up and running in less
than a minute.
And in addition to announcing the general availability of YUI 3,
Yahoo also has updated the YUI website to better support the growing
communities using both YUI 2 and YUI 3, Miraglia said.
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