Ajaxus place on the net

Few days ago the YUI development community was pleased to announce the release of version 2.6.0 of the YUI Library. You can download YUI 2.6.0 from SourceForge or configure your implementation using the updated YUI Configurator.

2.6.0 introduces a new Carousel Control, offers the Paginator Control for general use (it was previously bundled with DataTable), includes more than 450 total fixes, enhancements and optimizations, graduates eight components out of “beta,” and now ships with more than 290 functional examples.

What is new:

1) Added Carousel Control, contributed by Gopal Venkatesan (and based on the Carousel originally created by former Yahoo Bill Scott), provides a widget for browsing among a set of like objects arrayed vertically or horizontally in an overloaded page region. Like most YUI controls, Carousel can consume content from page markup using progressive enhancement techniques or be created, configured, and populated entirely via script. It has built-in support for the lazy-loading of content via XMLHttpRequest (aka Ajax) using YUI’s Connection Manager. And be sure to notice that Carousel’s ARIA Plugin example makes it easy to use the WAI-ARIA Roles and States with the Carousel control.

2) The Paginator Control which addresses the navigation aspect of chunked content, offering a set of controls that it can render into your UI to allow users to navigate through logical sections of local or remote data. It’s a great tool for managing page load times by reducing the amount of markup or data needed per page. In combination with Connection Manager or DataSource, paging through large sets of server side data is easy and can avoid the need for full page loads.

The simplicity of the getting started example risks hiding Paginator’s power, so be sure to explore the choices for configuring the Paginator. Plus, it’s built on a UI component architecture that allows implementers to easily create custom Paginator controls that will work automatically.

The Paginator Control was introduced with DataTable in version 2.5.0, but it has been broken out as an optional dependency for general use as of version 2.6.0.

3) Over 450 Improvements

Find out more from here.

The Flash-y folks at Yahoo! have released a slew of Flash and Flex components in their ASTRA suite:
New Flash components:

* AlertManager — a user interface component that creates alert windows and manages their queue.
* AudioPlayback — a set of controls for audio playback.
* MenuBar — a component that renders hierarchical data as a row of buttons with nested menus (using the Menu component)

On the Flex front, we have:

* AutoCompleteManager is a component that manages a set of input controls, popping up suggestions when a user types into one of the fields. Instead of replacing TextInput fields with a specific AutoComplete control, you can simply point the manager to one or more TextInputs, and you’ll get a slick pop-up or auto-fill interaction.
* Color Pickers:
o ColorPlaneAndSliderPicker is a user interface component that allows the user to pick a color value. It combines a one-dimensional color slider with a two-dimensional color plane.
o ColorSliderPicker is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to pick a color value. It combines a set of sliders where each slider represents a component of a colorspace. For example, a ColorSliderPicker displaying an RGB color includes a red slider, a green slider, and a blue slider.
o DropDownColorPicker is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to pick a color value. Similar to the standard Flex ColorPicker control, the DropDownColorPicker also gives the developer the ability to completely change the dropdown control to give the user a variety of color views.
* IPv4AddressInput is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to input an Internet Protocol version 4 address. This control includes a field for each separate byte and full keyboard navigation.
* TimeInput is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to input a time value. This control include fields for hours, minutes, seconds, and AM/PM. Styling options allow the time to be presented in 12- or 24-hour formats.
* TimeStepper is a user interface component for Flex that allows the user to input a time value. This control include fields for hours, minutes, seconds, and AM/PM. Styling options allow the time to be presented in 12- or 24-hour formats. Up and down buttons allow the user to increase or decrease the currently selected field.

Among updates to the existing components:

* The Tree component has been updated with new functionality that makes it much easier to change node icons and control branch nodes (see examples).
* The Charts component now has animation, some adjustments to the PieChart live preview, and several bug fixes.

Read the source

Yesterday was released the latest version of Yahoo Javascript library - YahooUI. It’s available for download and full documentation is also online at their site.

What is new:

- Selector Utility: The YUI Selector Utility implements much of the CSS Selector syntax as defined by the W3C, including the proposed CSS3 Selector extensions.

- Charts Control: The Charts Control draws data from the same DataSource Utility that underpins the YUI DataTable Control, making it possible to do combined chart/table visualizations. The Charts Control accepts CSS style information, allowing you to skin the chart itself without touching the underlying .swf file.

- Get Utility: Get provides an interface for dynamically adding script nodes and CSS link nodes to the page.

- Profiler: Profiler allows you to target specific code for profiling and to retrieve profiling data programmatically while your application is running — in any A-Grade browser.

- JSON Utility

- Button:

- Calendar: Satyen Desai has added built-in year navigation to the YUI Calendar Control.

- Drag & Drop: If your implementation requires simple drag-to-reposition functionality, this configuration option suppresses the complex targeting and interaction logic that is the most computationally intensive aspect of drag and drop; in those cases, you’ll see significant performance boosts.

- Rich Text Editor: Dav continues to push the YUI Rich Text Editor in both size and performance. With 2.4.0, you can better control the dependency list, allowing you to shave more than 50% off the overall k-weight of the widget (vs. its 2.3.1 profile) if you don’t need some of the glossier UI elements.

For full list of changes and more explanation words, please visit here.

We’re all living on the web, and we all seem to be starting our own websites, so it’s time we all learned the languages that make it run. The guys at Mashable.com have gathered over 250 resources to help you get going.

This list is aggregated from previous Mashable posts.

The list is quite extensive and features many ajax libraries, loading indicators etc so its best to be viewed at the original place.

The guys at thecodecentral.com had developed pretty nice implementation of Asynchronous File Upload. It worked quite smooth as I tested it, here is what they say:

The theory that makes asynchronous file upload work is not complicate, but the code for it to work can be a little bit lengthy if it was developed from the scratch. Since there no reason to reinvent the wheel and YUI’s Connection Manager can take care of most of the dirty jobs for us, in this article, I’ll show you how to use it to do a simple asynchronous file upload. Because XMLHttpRequest object does not support file upload, the Connection Manager uses inline frame approach. Basically what the Connection Manager does is it creates an invisible IFRAME for file upload and parses the server response once the upload is completed. In the end, what you get is an illusion of Ajax-like file upload interaction. However, since this is an IFRAME, some Ajax events such as success or failure are not available in IFRAME method as they are available in regular Ajax request in YUI.

Try their demo example here
Their original post is here

Also check this solution. Its made the old-school-way with separate iframe file but also has implemented progres bar