next*

On Tuesday, the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) team celebrated their second anniversary of making life easier for front-end developers. The YUI is a set of JavaScript utilities and controls, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

There were not quite simultaneous parties in London--in a dark West End pub, and in Sunnyvale--at Yahoo's HQ. YUI has fostered a dedicated, generous community of developers helping each other out and contributing knowledge and code to the project. The Sunnyvale party celebrated some of the heroes of this far-flung community. You'll find ample coverage on the YUI blog (thanks Eric!) and more good stuff on the Y! Developer Network blog.

Christian Heilmann is a Yahoo technology evangelist based in the U.K -- Christian started warming up for the festivities a week earlier, with a talk he delivered at GeekUp Leeds, a grassroots gathering of web developers in the north west of England. Christian's presentation takes a head-on approach to YUI's terrible twos with a compelling answer to the question, "Why the YUI?" (or furthermore, "why any library"). Watch for yourself:

You can follow along with the presentation, Y the YUI? over at slideshare.net.

Big thanks to Dominic Hodgson, and the folks from NorthCast, who documented Christian's presentation at Geekup Leeds, at the Old Broadcasting House, and gave us permission to distribute their video by embedding it here.

If you just want to see some party photos of 60 or 70 happy developers drinking beers in London ("in a dark and dingy pub so the lighting is rather moody"), here's a set for you:
YUI Library and YPattern Library Turn 2!

Some stunning photos of happy developers, this time from Sunnyvale, thanks to Dustin Diaz, who has generously let us use some of them in the "Who We Are" slideshow above on the right rail:
YUI 2nd Birthday

Popularity: 25% [?]