launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Richard Harding <rick.harding@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 21 Jun 2012, Gavin Panella wrote:

> On 21 June 2012 16:16, Curtis Hovey <curtis.hovey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> ...
> > We were naive. We did not know how to build proper YUI widgets.
>
> At the time I'm not sure that YUI knew how to make a proper YUI
> widget. I think the docs have since improved, and YUI itself has
> figured itself out, though I still think widgets are really difficult
> to get right. I feel like I'd need to live and breathe YUI to do a
> properly good job. Is this complexity a failing of YUI, or is it just
> that writing UI code is complicated?

It's a couple of parts. Writing good reusable widgets is more work than
what you need to get stuff on the page.

YUI does some magic for you so you do have to learn/understand how things
owrk. initializer is stacked in the inheritance chain, renderUI isn't (for
example). So this can go under the 'complicated' part, but it's part of
learning a library.

Plugins are a huge win for reusable bits and I don't think we stop at
plugins enough for many things we do.

I also think we don't really have a great widget example. I know the
indicator widget that Deryck and I did we tried to setup as a nice example,
but it's hard to help someone build a good widget without giving them
something decent to crib from.

I'm really hoping to be able to try to help with some of this and if anyone
ever needs a hand with any of this please feel free to ping me, assign me
as a reviewer to JS, etc. I know I've worked with JC a lot lately to help
review his cleanup of things like the picker code. It's taken a little bit
longer, but once you learn the YUI library bits the code ends up smaller
and much more flexible.

I'm currently looking to setup a dev environment to be able to push things
upstream to the YUI Gallery and really want to encourage devs to point out
things that are good candidates for pushing upstream. I'm more than willing
to help adjust and setup things to start to really bring the modules
together there.

--

Rick Harding

Launchpad Developer
https://launchpad.net/~rharding
@mitechie