Important Announcement Regarding YUI

[Julien Lecomte]

Howdy!

The Yahoo User Interface library (YUI) has been in use at Yahoo since 2005, and was first announced to the public on February 13, 2006. Although it has evolved tremendously since that time, YUI has always served the same overarching purpose of providing a comprehensive toolkit to make it easier for developers to create rich web applications. As such, YUI is an important part of Yahoo’s history: millions of lines of code relying on YUI have been written and are still in use at Yahoo today. However, it has become clear to us that the industry is now headed in a new direction. As most of you know, the web platform has been undergoing a drastic transformation over the past few years. JavaScript is now more ubiquitous than ever. The emergence of Node.JS has allowed JavaScript to be used on the server side, opening the door to creating isomorphic single page applications. New package managers (npm, bower) have spurred the rise of an ecosystem of 3rd party, open source, single-purpose tools that complement each other, embracing the UNIX philosophy and enabling very complex development use cases. New build tools (Grunt and its ecosystem of plugins, Broccoli, Gulp) have made it easier to assemble those tiny modules into large, cohesive applications. New application frameworks (Backbone, React, Ember, Polymer, Angular, etc.) have helped architecting web applications in a more scalable and maintainable way. New testing tools (Mocha, Casper, Karma, etc.) have lowered the barrier of entry to building a solid continuous delivery pipeline. Standard bodies (W3C, Ecma) are standardizing what the large JavaScript frameworks have brought to the table over the years, making them available natively to a larger number of devices. Finally, browser vendors are now committed to making continuous improvements to their web browsers while aligning more closely with standards. With so called “evergreen web browsers”, which are making it easier for users to run the latest stable version of a web browser, we can expect a significant reduction in the amount of variance across user agents.

The consequence of this evolution in web technologies is that large JavaScript libraries, such as YUI, have been receiving less attention from the community. Many developers today look at large JavaScript libraries as walled gardens they don’t want to be locked into. As a result, the number of YUI issues and pull requests we’ve received in the past couple of years has slowly reduced to a trickle. Most core YUI modules do not have active maintainers, relying instead on a slow stream of occasional patches from external contributors. Few reviewers still have the time to ensure that the patches submitted are reviewed quickly and thoroughly.

Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to immediately stop all new development on YUI in order to focus our efforts on this new technology landscape. This means that, going forward, new YUI releases will likely be few and far between, and will only contain targeted fixes that are absolutely critical to Yahoo properties.

The mission of the YUI team at Yahoo continues to be to deliver the best next-generation presentation technologies with an initial focus on internal developers. We remain optimistic about the future of web presentation technologies and are eager to continue working with the external frontend community to share and learn together.

Julien and the Yahoo Presentation Technologies team @ Yahoo

[jonesr]

Is this the news you were referring to when you said this in a yuiblog comment back in July? :
"A lot of cool things are happening, but nothing we can talk about just yet…"

Not so cool. If you'd been up front with the community when this move was planned (and clearly you've been laying the ground work for it for some time now), people could have made better decisions in terms of starting migration towards something that is not dead. As it is, I've wasted another month since your "lots of cool things are happening comment" writing a bunch more legacy YUI code. Very disappointed in how this was handled.

[Marc Schipperheyn]

This move has so far been very poorly handled. Regardless of this, when a professional company sunsets a technology, I would expect effort to be put into offering migration paths for its clients and give them time to deal with it.

Yes, we are clients and we have paid with time, code and support. For those of us with large investments in YUI code, this choice creates quite simply a problem. And Yahoo should reduce the impact of this problem it created by its rather sudden decision by e.g. publishing articles and tools that migrate your code to other platforms or leverage them. Also, there are a number of people who have contributed significantly to YUI, e.g. Marco Asbreuk, AlloyUI. Was any attempt made to discuss with them any kind of community continuation?

Right now, it's just like: ok, we made a choice and effective 3 months ago we pulled the plug, deal with it, bye. 

Thanks for the respect Yahoo.

[Wiedmann Thomas]

Nice new projects to create and leave old just fall. Why should I trust you in the future?

Yahoo is gone. Hope anyone will put up the pieces and take YUI code to a new real community project.

[Erik Pearson]

On Saturday, August 30, 2014 9:23:34 AM UTC-7, Wiedmann Thomas wrote:

Nice new projects to create and leave old just fall. Why should I trust you in the future?

This is typical of Yahoo! There are quite a few dark cobwebby alleys in Yahoo's developer outreach neighborhood. Yahoo seems to excel at projects with grandiose visions, replete with marketing prose, with little to no follow through, abandonment, and finally termination.

 

Yahoo is gone. Hope anyone will put up the pieces and take YUI code to a new real community project.

I hope so too, at least the most important parts of it. It is an awful lot of work to toss away. I always felt that the "YUI way" felt more natural to me than, e.g., the "jquery way". If I had to put it in a nutshell, I'd say it is the more explicit programming style, rather than the "magic" style based on the $ and cute method names. It may be more verbose, but I find it easier to write and maintain. I think there is also real value in a set of modules that harmonizes and is tested together.

I also really appreciated the Gallery, if more the promise of it than the actual implementation. Compared to using unreliable jquery plugins or monolithic frameworks like extjs or dojo etc, YUI seemed like a nice middle ground. User contributions that are vetted, presented in a uniform gallery with built in support, and presented as comprehensive builds, seemed like a great idea (and still is in my little book of great ideas.) 

I think one value of the YUI approach is in small to medium sized interactive web sites. Sure, large projects can have build their own framework out of libraries, using dependency management, build, testing, deployment tools. That is just plain ol' software development. But this is more suitable to building a single page web app (and as Yahoo is focusing on now, a "isomorphic" web service).  For interactive web sites, composed of dozens or hundreds of pages, which grows over time and may itself be composed of independent template components, YUI is really a great fit.

[Julien Lecomte]

Folks,

Let's try and think this through rationally for a second.

1. I agree that the announcement should have come a long time ago. Maybe a year ago, when all new development on YUI effectively ceased. There is nothing else I can say about this besides apologizing to the community.

2. Yahoo relies on YUI more than any other company in the world. Therefore, we need to find a gradual migration path as well. It's not like we can rewrite millions of lines of JavaScript code overnight... Rest assured that we will share with the community what we think is the new way forward.

3. YUI continues to work and is open source. Fork it, do whatever you want with it. The future of your fork is in your own hands. Don't expect Yahoo, even though it has been a very generous company, to do all the work.

4. After 9 years, we think it's time for us to move on to new technologies, and you should use this time as an opportunity to consider in which direction you want to take your projects.

Let's try and keep the discourse as civil as possible. Remember that behind any large company like Yahoo, there are good people who want to do the right thing.

Thanks,

Julien

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[Simon Gilligan]

Julien,

1. Howdy! is hardly the right tone for this announcement
   
   
2. I find your tech argument a diversion.  YUI may now be old school, but so is Dojo, ExtJS5 and Kendo. The real issue is how did yuilibrary loose it's momentum? By your admission, a full year of no core contribution (are you taunting us we should have been more alert?) is at least 1 year in the making prior to that. That's 2 years (maybe even more) of decline to now, which speaks to me of Yahoo internal politics
   
   
3. I find no assurance that you will share with the community what external js components you think best replicate/improve upon what yui3 currently offers
   
   
4. Show me the words where you acknowledge the pain this will cause other businesses. It's a 'this is it, we'll hurt too'. With your resources, you will hurt nowhere near what others will. 
   

Yahoo want out, regardless of technology and industry direction. Internal priorities have changed. Yuilibrary is a cost centre that will no longer be funded. So be it. It's a lesson learned about corporate backed open source initiatives. Buyer beware.

So who am I to be giving this feedback? Just a small, competent developer/business owner running a small tech company. The tooling and capability YUI3 has given me has been a boon to my productivity and product robustness. I am less interested in the JS technology of the day vs the business case for adding a particular capability to my product.

I am grateful to what Yahoo has built with YUI. I know projects come and go. Thankfully YUI's standards of code engineering leave 3.17 stable and will give me years to find my own way forward. Goodbye & Good Luck as they say.

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[Erik Pearson]

Thanks for engaging, Julien.

Please understand, though, that YUI users may have some feelings to vent ... frustration, betrayal, shame. For me, that would be a reflection of how much I admired, hoped for, and promoted YUI in my sphere. It is really water under the bridge, but it certainly could have been handled better, and in a more open spirit. Perhaps it is more a reflection that open development and closed corporate culture are really not entirely compatible. To me there is more about open source than github, it is an attitude of shared vision, transparency, and responsibility to the community.

You are right, though, that Yahoo has sunk a lot into YUI and has the most to lose (or gain if one sees YUI as an albatross), or at least the most work to do to migrate away from it. I appreciate that. I hope that those at Yahoo who will continue to be involved in YUI, even as users rather than core developers, can join those of us who stick around and attempt to keep YUI going absent Yahoo sponsorship.

I'm grateful that you were here to communicate what is happening -- see, it wasn't that hard :)

Thanks, Erik.

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[Wiedmann Thomas]

Hi Simon,


-----[quote]----------------

Julien,

1. Howdy! is hardly the right tone for this announcement
   
   
2. I find your tech argument a diversion.  YUI may now be old school, but so is Dojo, ExtJS5 and Kendo. The real issue is how did yuilibrary loose it's momentum? By your admission, a full year of no core contribution (are you taunting us we should have been more alert?) is at least 1 year in the making prior to that. That's 2 years (maybe even more) of decline to now, which speaks to me of Yahoo internal politics
   
   
3. I find no assurance that you will share with the community what external js components you think best replicate/improve upon what yui3 currently offers
   
   
4. Show me the words where you acknowledge the pain this will cause other businesses. It's a 'this is it, we'll hurt too'. With your resources, you will hurt nowhere near what others will. 
   

Yahoo want out, regardless of technology and industry direction. Internal priorities have changed. Yuilibrary is a cost centre that will no longer be funded. So be it. It's a lesson learned about corporate backed open source initiatives. Buyer beware.

So who am I to be giving this feedback? Just a small, competent developer/business owner running a small tech company. The tooling and capability YUI3 has given me has been a boon to my productivity and product robustness. I am less interested in the JS technology of the day vs the business case for adding a particular capability to my product.

I am grateful to what Yahoo has built with YUI. I know projects come and go. Thankfully YUI's standards of code engineering leave 3.17 stable and will give me years to find my own way forward. Goodbye & Good Luck as they say.

----------------------

Exactly! Right words. YUI is a strong framework. I love it, but it's time to go.

[victor gavilan]

I want to thanks Yahoo! all the work and time dedicated to YUI. But I think that now is time to became YUI in a community driven project. Have Yahoo any planning for that?
and what will be the future of other projects depending on YUI like mojito?

Thanks

[John Lindal]

I, too, will miss YUI. However, the really great pieces from YUI, e.g., the gallery, have made their mark on the world. For example, AngularJS provides a gallery at http://ngmodules.org. Granted, there is a lower signal-to-noise ratio than in the YUI Gallery, but that’s just because there are so many more contributors. (To be fair, there are numerous ancient, unmaintained modules in the YUI Gallery, too.)

My work has mostly been in business applications, so I really appreciated the comprehensive set of widgets, e.g., DataTable w/ DataSource, and Yahoo permitted me to open source the widgets I built, e.g., Treeble. However, I remember that, while working at Yahoo, the YUI team told me that my team was the biggest internal user of DataTable. Business applications remain a niche.

For the rest of Yahoo, I think YUI has mostly been a browser-independence layer, providing Y.Node and Y.EventTarget. Now that even IE is going evergreen and IE8 is on the verge of disappearing, there is no longer a need for a thick browser-independence layer, and thick layers really hurt performance on mobile, so I can see why they wouldn’t want to sink more money into YUI.

Personally, I plan to start my next project in AngularJS and port over whatever I need from my YUI Gallery projects. Hopefully, I will be allowed to add those to the AngularJS gallery…

John

[jonesr]

It has been mentioned elsewhere, but the SSL cert on yuilibrary.com expired a couple of weeks ago. This impacts the CDN too, so anyone that tries to access the CND over https (which includes people with browser extensions such as 'HTTPS everywhere' installed) fail to load yui. Two weeks downtime for those trying to use the CDN in this manner. Is this the level of support for existing users of legacy YUI that we should expect going forward? I'm surprised Yahoo hasn't noticed this for its own sites, but I guess you folks might be using a separate CDN with a properly maintained cert, and it is just us external developers/suckers that are impacted by this?

[Pat Cavit]

The CDN has never officially supported HTTPS. What support were you expecting?

On 9/4/2014 2:56:55 AM, jonesr <jon...@gmail.com> wrote:

It has been mentioned elsewhere, but the SSL cert on yuilibrary.com expired a couple of weeks ago. This impacts the CDN too, so anyone that tries to access the CND over https (which includes people with browser extensions such as 'HTTPS everywhere' installed) fail to load yui. Two weeks downtime for those trying to use the CDN in this manner. Is this the level of support for existing users of legacy YUI that we should expect going forward? I'm surprised Yahoo hasn't noticed this for its own sites, but I guess you folks might be using a separate CDN with a properly maintained cert, and it is just us external developers/suckers that are impacted by this?

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[Erik Pearson]

I think the issue is more to whether there are any eyeballs on the web services surrounding YUI. If something as fundamental as failing to renew an SSL cert falls through the cracks for a couple of weeks, this tells us that there is no one minding the store.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo just completely closed down their developer outreach services (developer.yahoo.com, yuilibrary.com), because it feels like a ghost town. The technologies promoted are based on YUI -- I doubt anyone is going to start a project using them unless they really have to.

[jonesr]

On Friday, September 5, 2014 2:29:11 AM UTC+10, Pat Cavit wrote:

The CDN has never officially supported HTTPS. What support were you expecting?

Apologies, I assumed it was. I'd also incorrectly assumed the CDN was using the same cert as yuilibrary.com, but it seems it does not, and the failure reported by my users may not necessarily be related to their attempt for force https on their connections. I still find it concerning that yahoo hasn't been able to update their cert on yuilibrary.com which expired on 22nd August.