With all the jQuery posts I’ve made, and all the jQuery plugin work I’ve done, it may surprise you to learn that when I started moving from coding in pure JavaScript to using a library/framework, that I started using YUI first.

A few years back, when interest in the new JavaScript libraries really started to heat up, I took a look at what was out there. The main contenders at the time were YUI, jQuery, Mootools, and Dojo. After checking them all out, testing the examples they each provided, and reading the documentation, I decided to try YUI, figuring that since it was created and used by the folks at Yahoo! that it would not only be around for a while, but that it would be high quality. And I was right. Sort of. While the quality was high, there was also a learning curve to be tackled, and it was then that I hit my first wall with YUI’s documentation.

Let me take a minute to go off on a short tangent here. I love PHP. One thing I particularly love about PHP is how simple their website is, and how easy it is to learn about any part of the language. Pick a PHP function and you can find a page on php.net devoted to just that function which clearly explains everything about it. They start off explaining the function and what it does, the arguments you can pass to it, what you will get back from it, and any special notes. Then they show some real world examples and finish with user contributed notes. In my opinion this is perfect. It’s just the right amount of information to get anyone started, and it serves as an excellent reference. Not too much and not too little. Just right. Goldilocks knew her shit.

OK, back to YUI. I got into YUI sometime around their version 2.2.2 release in 2007. This was their first big release. Back then, YUI had basic documentation, not unlike PHP’s structure showing examples and explaining how-to-use the various features. My first problem arose when I needed help beyond what the YUI team had published. There weren’t many YUI tutorial or fan sites, so I turned to the YUI forum, which used to be a basic Yahoo! Group. This is where I got stuck, and in the end is what probably lead me to stray. The YUI group was pretty quiet, but the worst part was that I never received any real help. I’d post questions and they’d be completely ignored, which left me to turn back to my own resources and spend hours trying to figure out what was wrong. I’d pour over the YUI documentation, looking to see why I couldn’t do what I thought that I should be able to do, only to throw my hand up in frustration and walk away. Later I discovered errors in the YUI documentation but I couldn’t figure out where to make corrections or who to tell so that they could fix the problems so that others wouldn’t fall into the same hole that I did. I finally discovered that YUI was running a bug tracker on Sourceforge so I reported my bugs there and most of them were eventually, albeit silently, fixed. So after all this moving around from the YUI site for examples, the Yahoo! group for discussion, and Sourceforge for bugs, I was tired and discouraged. I felt like I was spinning my tires and getting very little in return.

About this time, jQuery had released a new version (1.2.6 in 2008 I think) so I decided to check them out and see what was going on in that camp. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. Not only did it seem like the jQuery project was growing bigger and bigger, but jQuery turned out to be easy to learn and use. Documentation was structured along on the same lines as PHP, however discussion about jQuery relied on Google groups. Uh-oh. At first I thought that this was going to be a repeat of my YUI experience so after trying some examples I decided to post a few questions to the group to see what kind of a response, if any, I’d get. To my surprise I received answers right away and they were useful, clear, and friendly. But the real shock was the small learning curve that came with jQuery. I was able to get up and running much faster with jQuery than I was with YUI. jQuery seemed more intuitive than YUI. Plus, jQuery was big on plugins, something that YUI barely mentioned. Plugins allowed you to not only easily use code that someone else had written, but you could build upon it and tweak it to do whatever you wanted. I was hooked.

To me, the simplicity and brevity of jQuery, along with its ability to create powerful and useful code with a small footprint, and plugins is what really makes it like the Swiss Army knife of JavaScript. YUI just wasn’t there yet and if it was, the YUI team wasn’t able to get that message across and share it with everyone. I don’t know about you, but once I find a product I like I tend to stick with it. While YUI, Mootools, and Dojo (et al) are all popular, competent JavaScript libraries/frameworks, nine times out of ten I’ll go out of my way to find a jQuery solution to a problem before I try to start learning another tool.

Around the same time that I was getting heavy into jQuery, Yahoo! released version 3 of YUI. So being a former YUI user I decided to see what the new version was all about, wondering if they had taken a huge leap forward. Maybe Yahoo! had addressed all my concerns with the fragmentation of documentation, errors, and support with this new release. In my opinion, while the technology of YUI 3 may have improved, unfortunately most other issues seemed to have stayed the same if not gotten worse. I tried to go through the examples and documentation of this new version only to find the learning curve even steeper than before. It seemed that anything YUI 3 could do, jQuery could do and with less pain. Many of YUI 3′s features were in beta form as well, including things like widgets and plugins. Maybe I didn’t give YUI 3 a fair shake since I had been turned off to it in the past and was also so satisfied with jQuery. Maybe I’m just not smart enough for the high level explanations that the YUI team likes to provide (although I have my BS in computer science, a MBA in business, and a pretty decent IQ so I’m hoping that’s not it). I’ve never enjoyed complex things that can be made simple. I love simplicity. And to me, jQuery is the epitome of simplicity. On the plus side for YUI 3, they seem to have a whole new discussion forum although I can’t attest to whether its any better than the last one (although I can say it’s far more tan/mocha colored than the old one).

That said, I suppose the rivalry that goes on between all the JavaScript libraries/frameworks is a good thing and that the friendly competition that it generates can only help spur on better development tools for everyone. In the end, each developer should use whichever tool he or she is most comfortable with and for me, right now that’s jQuery.