Yahoo for the Masses

Christian Heilmann | http://wait-till-i.com | http://scriptingenabled.org

Bangalore, India, Yahoo internal training, February 2009

This is going to be an interactive session, so don’t

feel bad for asking questions.

Yahoo is a big company with a lot of products.

As a representative of the Yahoo Developer Network I talk about the YDN and our

developer products in public.

I don’t speculate about products we have or our

stock price or what’s happening to the company.

And neither should you. This way trouble and annoyance

lies.

So let me introduce the way I like to portrait Yahoo in

public.

I see Yahoo as the big friendly giant.

Just like the big friendly giant we take the nice things and bring them to the people.

And we keep the bad things away from them.

And we have to constantly be aware of the other giants out

there...

...as the people we talk to have an almost unhealthy

drive to ask us how we compare with other giants.

As a matter of fact there are more and more big friendly

giants out there.

So baiting me to say bad things about the others is a

waste of time.

As it should be with you.

Let’s go through some of the offerings we bring the world

that get me excited.

Design Patterns

On the Yahoo Developer Network you can find

solutions to tasks that users need to fulfill on web sites.

These are based on research with real users and are live

and cross-referenced on Yahoo! sites.

All of them explained in detail and licensed Creative

Commons.

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns

This can be a base of your own interface and

information architecture.

They even come with stencils!

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/

YUI CSS

Basing your design and layout on an existing CSS

framework means you can build them very fast.

It also means they work across different browsers and

will work for browsers to come.

In terms of maintenance all you need to do is to update

one CSS file.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/builder/

Exceptional Performance

Using our exceptional performance tips and tools

you can make your sites work faster and more smoothly.

Faster and smoother experience = happier users

Exceptional Performance Tips:http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/

YSlow: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

And of course smushit.com

YUI

YUI is a base to build working, accessible and easy to re-style web applications on.

Working for us and thus probably working for the

world out there, too!

YUI makes web development more secure, predictable and

backed by a massive community of clever,

dedicated developers.

YUI also extends your web app capabilities.

What if HTML is not rich enough for your clients?

Almost all *free* and *big* JavaScript libraries come

with widgets that work and are proven in the market.

http://ui.jquery.com/

http://ui.jquery.comhttp://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

BOSS

What if a client asks you to build a specialist search?

You could buy databases and build an interface and get

servers to host and index the search...

Or you could use BOSS.

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/

BOSS allows you to build better search results easily.

http://ask-boss.appspot.com/

http://ask-boss.appspot.com/

Another cool thing BOSS does right now is provide a

mainstream channel for the semantic web and

Microformats.

People are trying to make the web a less messier place by

adding semantic data to HTML documents.

Using SearchMonkey technology BOSS now lists this information in the results.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/glenscott/3273401181/

view=searchmonkey_rdf

view=searchmonkey_feed

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/structureddata.html

Another interesting thing is the keyterms parameter in

BOSS.

http://keywordfinder.org

YahooTheater

Videos of talks, presentations and product demos to watch

and use in your own company’s training program.

YahooTheater

Security

Yahoo has a good security section on YDN.

We should do much more there.

Accessibility

There is some information on the YUI blog about all the

good accessibility work we do.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/category/accessibility/

There will be a full accessibility section on YDN

( which is on my plate ;) )

YQL

YQL is a SQL-style interface to all Yahoo data – and the web!

I like to call it the tin opener of the web – even when the juicy data is in a container

you can get access to it.

Especially now that we allow for open data tables.

This allows any company or institute or web site to allow

people to access and mash up their data.

For example a friend of mine works for the National

Maritime Museum in London.

They are already part of the Commons on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/people/nationalmaritimemuseum/

He wanted to allow people to access their free data and

filter it without providing an API.

All it needed was a simple XML file.

<?xml version="1.0"?><table xmlns="http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/schema/table.xsd"> <meta> <author>Jim O'Donnell</author> <documentationURL>http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/</documentationURL> </meta> <bindings> <select produces="XML" itemPath="rss.channel.item"> <urls> <url>http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/requestHandlers/doQuickSearch.cfm?searchterm={searchterm}&amp;authority={authority}&amp;category={category}&amp;startrow=1&amp;format=rss</url> </urls> <inputs> <key id="searchterm" type="xs:string" paramType="path" required="true"/> <key id="authority" type="xs:string" paramType="path" required="false" default="category"/> <key id="category" type="xs:string" paramType="path" required="false" default=""/> </inputs> </select> </bindings></table>

http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=use%20%27http%3A%2F%2Featyourgreens.org.uk%2Fyql%2Fnmm-search.xml%27%20as%20nmm%3B%0Aselect%20*%20from%20nmm%20where%20category%20%3D%20%27art

%27%20and%20searchterm%20%3D%20%22tower%20bridge%22

This is just the start. I am really excited about YQL.

A good BFG also should listen well.

And this is where we are not doing a good enough job.

I’ll need all of you to see what’s going on out there.

Find good examples of uses of our technologies, and tell the

YDN folk about it.

We’re happy to tell the world who has done good stuff with

our stuff :)

On the other hand we also need to know how people get

stuck and what they would like from our products.

So whenever you are out there and you hear people

having issues...

...point them to the right channels.

Help is there, we are a BFG.

Keep in touch:

Christian Heilmann

http://wait-till-i.com

http://scriptingenabled.org

http://twitter.com/codepo8

T H A N K S !