![\"\"](\"http:\/\/dylanschiemann.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/londonaugclearbg.png\" "\\"London"){kind=spacer}
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December 14th was the 9th and final London Ajax User Group<\/a> event for 2010. The topic was widgets, with talks about YUI and Dojo’s Dijit.<\/p>\n A quick aside: I started this group earlier this year with Piotr Zalewa of MooTools and JSFiddle fame as I wanted to meet more people in London given the amount of time I am here, and bring a bit of the JavaScript valley culture to London.<\/p>\n This event was interesting as I had lost my voice, so fortunately I wasn’t a scheduled speaker. We started off by announcing a pair of prizes:<\/p>\n Everyone in attendance received an entry, and all reasonably good questions received an additional ballot entry.<\/p>\n The first talk was delivered by Matt Parker<\/a> on the topic of YUI. Matt started by talking about the difference between the two versions of currently in use, YUI2 and YUI3.<\/p>\n He showed off an example with a number of widgets from a product his company works on, and talked briefly about .<\/p>\n After a quick intro to YUI2, he moved on to YUI3 which has a much more efficient and modular coding style. YUI 3.2 has a short list of widgets: overlay, editor (no UI), scroll view, slider, tab view, with more coming in version 3.3: Charts, tree, autocomplete, datatable.<\/p>\n YUI3 makes it easy to pull in YUI2 code which is fortunate given that YUI3 is still a work in progress, as it was a complete rewrite from YUI2.<\/p>\n There’s a YUI community gallery on Github<\/a>, and it’s easy to include widgets from that gallery:<\/p>\n Matt also showed off the Alloy UI from Liferay<\/a>, which looks to be a very promising external widget project.<\/p>\n YUI3 has a significant focus on performance, with almost everything being modular and pluggable.<\/p>\n Other nice things in YUI3 include touch events, and an experimental project for using Node.js for server-side rendering of widgets.<\/p>\n Sam Foster<\/a> of Dojo<\/a> and SitePen<\/a> then delivered a talk on Dijit.<\/p>\n Sam mentioned that the name Dijit represents many things: a project, namespace UI components, framework, and a guarantee (of quality).<\/p>\n Dojo has been around for 6 years and carries a lot of really hard earned, painful lessons. One major rewrite and significant incremental releases have occurred over this time. Sam distilled the most important Dojo APIs into one simple slide.<\/p>\n Dijit is themeable, accessible, internationalized, extensible, and production-ready. There’s an impressive theme tester<\/a>, and Dijit is part of each major Dojo release.<\/p>\n There’s a newly launched Dijit-based Dojo API viewer<\/a> that supports the current and several recent versions of Dojo.<\/p>\n Dijit provides CSS for themes, allows for instantiation of widgets through declarative markup (1.6 uses HTML5 data attributes instead of custom attributes) or JavaScript.<\/p>\n DojoX provides many additional widgets outside the scope of Dijit including grids, charts, image widgets, and much more.<\/p>\n Dijit contains many classes of widgets, including layout widgets, form widgets, and more.<\/p>\n Sam concluded by discussing the value of ui frameworks, Dijit precepts, and explaining what actually is a widget (HTML\/CSS\/JavaScript).<\/p>\n The talks were great, and the video and slides<\/a> will soon be available.<\/p>\nPrizes<\/h2>\n
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YUI<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/dylanschiemann.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/5262981157_2559270209_z-300x225.jpg\" "\\"Matt")
<\/a><\/p>\nYUI.use('gallery-treeviewlite', function(Y){});<\/pre>\nDijit<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/dylanschiemann.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/5262983101_79338149a8_z-300x225.jpg\" "\\"Sam")
<\/a><\/p>\nWrap-up<\/h2>\n