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.