Forum OpenACS Q&A: Ajaxhelper, YUI and xowiki

Posted by Richard Hamilton on 01/31/11 05:13 PM

I have a little experience with coding using the YUI3 library using the dynamic loading capability and the terse declarative syntax, but no experience of using YUI2 and OpenACS Ajaxhelper.

I am trying to understand the xowiki carousel includelet so that I can modify it to work with the new YUI3 carousel.

From what I can see, AjaxHelper takes care of adding script tags to the page header for any Javascript modules that the page requires, and also provides a convenient way to add javascript library functions to dynamically generated pages.

YUI3 provides it own dynamic loader which loads only those modules that are required. I am not clear whether this means that YUI3 components need not be involved with Ajaxhelper, or whether I should start by adding YUI3 support to Ajaxhelper?

I can see that when adding YUI3 functions to an xowiki page I need only source the YUI3 dynamic loader and activate those modules used in the page, however when writing an includelet I guess the YUI3 dynamic loader should itself be loaded through Ajaxhelper as with YUI2.

Hopefully this will become clearer to me with time but for now I am finding the code quite confusing.

I would appreciate some guidance on this.

Regards
Richard

2: Re: Ajaxhelper, YUI and xowiki (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 01/31/11 05:23 PM

Hi,

I recommend avoiding ajaxhelper and using template::head to load whatever javascript you need.

3: Re: Ajaxhelper, YUI and xowiki (response to 2)

Posted by Richard Hamilton on 01/31/11 05:52 PM

Thanks Dave, I will.

Regards
Richard

4: Re: Ajaxhelper, YUI and xowiki (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 02/01/11 08:58 AM

if you build on the xowiki-includelet infrastructure, i would recommend to use the same mechanism that the other 50+ includelet classes in xowiki use, namely require_YUI_CSS and require_YUI_JS. These functions allow you to use either locally installed versions (per default from the ajaxhelper package) for internet-free execution, or to use versions from the Yahoo content distribution network (yui.yahooapis.com). This is controlled via the ajaxhelper switch (it does not use the package - such as the ajaxhelper loader etc - just the files).

The require_YUI* methods provide an xowiki-specific configuration for all YUI needs in xowiki and friends. These functions control as well the YUI version numbers. The preconfigured version is YUI 2.7.0. In general, i would not recommend to mix YUI versions. Not all newer YUI versions are fully upward compatible, i had to step back e.g. from 2.8.* to 2.7.0 due to changes in drag and drop. If you use multiple YUI components from different YUI versions on a single page, you are probably asking for troubles.

5: Re: Ajaxhelper, YUI and xowiki (response to 4)

Posted by Richard Hamilton on 02/03/11 06:22 PM

Right! Ok, thank you.

According to the YUI3 docs, YUI3 is completely encapsulated (they say sandboxed) so that it can co-exist safely with other instances of YUI3 and various YUI2 versions. However, I am in no hurry to create additional problems for myself! 😊

I think I will thrash this through using YUI2 and worry about migrating to YUI3 later.