AlloyUI – a framework built on top of YUI3

http://alloyui.com/

by srid68 • 13 years ago

136 22 13 years ago

alloyui.com

gotofritz• 13 years ago

Oh, yes, the Liferay UI library built on top of YUI. I avoided it like the plague when I had to work with Liferay.

pjmlp• 13 years ago

Same here, at the time they hardly had any documentation, not sure how the situation improved.

We ended up using basic JSPs or servlets, depending on the portlet use case, with the bulk of UI done with jQuery and custom components provided by a designer company.

HugoDias• 13 years ago

totally agree with sheldon's here.

natecavanaugh3• 13 years ago

Hey guys, Eduardo and I started AlloyUI at Liferay back in 2009. I'm sorry to hear about your experiences, and I completely understand. When it was just the two of us, in addition to handling the entire UI for Liferay, we also wrote 60 components in a few months, so we were pulled a little thin. We have since expanded the team, and we've made a lot of improvements in both the documentation as well as the components themselves.

If you have a chance to check out the site, or play around, we'd love to hear any feedback :)

legutierr2• 13 years ago

Hi Nate, this looks really useful, thanks for your work on this, and for releasing it.

I've got some questions, if you've got the time...

* Why YUI? When I think of YUI, I tend to think "overkill". Obviously you've done a ton of work on this since 2009; is there anything you couldn't have accomplished building this on top of jQuery (just as an example)?

* Does AlloyUI play well with others? For instance, if I wanted to incorporate one or two of your widgets in a UI built on top of Bootstrap or Foundation, would I run into trouble? What of MV* frameworks (Ember, Angular, etc.), or just plain-vanella jQuery?

* Testing this out on an iPad I found that some widgets seem to work well (calendar), but others (photo crop) not so much. Do you intend to target touch devices?

* You have a code editor, and a toolbar that seems intended for a rich text editor, but I don't see a rich text editor included. Do you have plans to add a rich text editor? Especially because YUI3's rich text editor is very limited out of the box, this would seem to be a great addition.

jwarren• 13 years ago

I've never used seriously used YUI, but this actually seems like a really nice library. I'm impressed with the breadth of it. The Rosetta Stone is also a great idea which really takes away a lot of the fears of using a different library.

jonahx• 13 years ago

+1 to the rosetta stone. I'd love to see more libraries including something like that.

joeblau• 13 years ago

Wow this library looks great. Some of the widgets like the image cropper and schedule look amazing. Thanks fot he post.

Edit: Wow, I really like the diagram builder. I've been looking for something like this for almost a year.

mhd• 13 years ago

Are there some extended examples? I'm not quite sure whether this is closer to JQuery UI (i.e. some widgets for normal web pages) or ExtJS (desktop-like Intranet apps). Looking at documentation for e.g. the DataTable, it seems it's closer to the former. (Where I wouldn't be looking at YUI3 right now, as compared to e.g. Angular or Ember. I would be "in the market" for a decent enough ExtJS replacement though...)

juandopazo2• 13 years ago

You can look at the YUI User Guides[1] for more in depth documentation of the components that AlloyUI shares with YUI.

[1] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/guides/

ccleve• 13 years ago

The breadth of this library is really remarkable. It feels slow, though.

I think people underestimate the importance of a snappy fast interface. We use bootstrap + handlebars and get really fast response, at the cost of having to build a lot ourselves.

juandopazo2• 13 years ago

YUI and Alloy actually have a few tools that help you write snappy interfaces.

1) The loader[1]. The ability to load modules on demand help a lot with reducing the initial kweight of your page. The loader supports very easily concatenation of scripts which has a huge impact in perceived performance. It also does conditional loading, which means that it doesn't load compatibility code for old browsers when it isn't necessary.

2) You also get the flavor of templates you like. They come bundled with Handlebars and Template.Micro[2], a very light and fast template engine similar to Underscore templates.

[1] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/yui/#dynamic-loading-with-use

[2] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/template/#using-templatemicro

usablebytes• 13 years ago

3 years back, when we had to use it with Liferay, the experience wasn't really great. Hope it has improved now; need to check.

detay• 13 years ago

I expect to see more from a UI library, instead of a bunch of "would be cool to add" modules. When you use a UI library in your project you somehow get married to it. For everything that UI library doesn't provide you have to use other libraries, then it becomes a mess.

For this reason I refuse to use a non-complete library (where as lots of UI elements are missing such as this one). If I'll have to fill the missing parts with other frameworks I won't use it at the very beginning.

skram• 13 years ago

Which libraries do you find to be "complete"? Just curious

IzzyMurad• 13 years ago

Most of these widgets already come bundled with Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/javascript.html) and it's done better; see http://alloyui.com/examples/button/, for example, you get a checkbox then it's converted to a button after being displayed for a brief period.

akamel• 13 years ago

I overall agree that bootstrap seems to cover most of these controls in a better way; that said, I think AlloyUI has css3 buttons that don't exhibit the 'loading' effect you described [click on css3 tab in the link you gave]

AlloyUI – a framework built on top of YUI3

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