Impressive Event Library from Yahoo!

I really like the Event UI library from Yahoo (picked up via Jonathan Snook and Dustin Diaz). The library is relatively small, but it packs some serious meat. I believe this library can be a solid foundation to a more comprehensive suite of client-side libraries, should Yahoo! pursue such an initiative.

Besides Event, Yahoo! made available several other modules, aka Yahoo! User Interface Library components. One pet peeve of mine with this collection is the weakness of the Dom Utility library. There’s really not much to it. In fact, Prototype does all that and a heck lot more.

Thus the quest for the ultimate client-side library/framework continues (Prototype being my favorite so far). Yahoo! has been very active, and I’m curious to see how they ramp up their UI offerings in the near future. I don’t quite get why they started a Design Pattern Library. If you want web UI patters, buy The Design of Sites—that’s what this book is about.

Alternatives

The two alternatives to Yahoo’s Event module that spring to mind are Dojo and Behaviour. What about Atlas? I really can’t tell from looking at Quickstarts if simple tasks of setting up event handlers are available. In its current shape and form Atlas invokes the following allegory in my mind:

You come up to a geeky looking guy and ask what time it is. He looks at his wrist watch and promptly reports, “The local time is 10:27am, or 3:27pm GMT. It is 7:27am in Los Angeles, 4:27pm in Paris and 3:27am in Kamchatka. The current temperature is 42F, with today’s high of 48F and low of 40F. Today is cloudy, with winds S at 10 to 15 mph, and 4.76 of precipitation.”

“Wow,” you say. “That’s a great watch!”

“I know,” says the geek, wiping sweat from his forehead and adjusting the straps of his heavy backpack. “It’s just that the batteries are heavy as hell.”