Hi all, there has been quite a long delay since the last blog post. For those of you who weren't able to check out the webinar, the reasons behind the long silence in my blog postings has been due to the work on the AlloyUI framework.

Over the past 6 months, Eduardo Lundgren and I have been furiously working away building a unified UI library on top of the revolutionary YUI3.

So today, I wanted to answer a few questions about it (in case you have yet to check out the webinar), and to also prep for the coming weeks and blog posts.

The simplest way to describe Alloy is that it's a library of tools, a collection of frameworks, put together and built into one unit. We're taking years of building UIs and the problems we've kept solving and boiling that knowledge down, and releasing it as a separate project.

One of the most common questions I get is: "So what about jQuery and jQuery UI?" You will still be able to use jQuery and jQuery UI (or any javascript or front end library of your choice) in Liferay.

We have however stopped using it for our portlets and plugins, and are instead building everything on top of Alloy.

Liferay is a platform, first and foremost. As such, we want people building on that platform to use the tools they feel most comfortable building with, be it Icefaces, Vaadin, jQuery, dojo, etc.

Much in the same way that in OSX, developers can use other windowing and widget toolkits, such as Swing, to build applications. However, if you want to really leverage the power of the operating system, and really want to have the nicest looking applications, you're going to use Cocoa.

That's what we want to accomplish with Alloy.

Another question I've gotten is why YUI3? There are numerous other javascript libraries on the market, why build on top of one that is a relative newcomer?

One of the questions we definitely asked ourselves was how many existing components and widgets does the library have? But what was a much more important factor was how quickly could quality production level widgets be built?

How clear was the thinking behind the widgeting system? How much documentation was there for it?

These were questions that YUI3 had great answers for. Answers so great that Eduardo and I were able to build roughly 60 utilities and widgets in about 6 months time.

We also looked at the team behind the library, and the types of problems they were solving. Instead of being run by an ivory tower, or an unmanageably large committee, it's developed by a productive "pizza-sized" team thats renowned for leading front end innovation on the web.

They're truly solving problems ranging from the small to the large, which runs very closely to how Liferay works. We wanted a system that could be used on the small scale (let's say you only want to sprinkle in very simple interaction to a website for mainly displaying content), or on the large scale (as in an application interface).

YUI3 is designed to be stretched to those different scenarios seamlessly.

The other question I've gotten is "can it be used outside of Liferay?" and the answer is a resounding yes. We have actually developed Alloy in entirely different repository of our SVN, and maintain it as a third party project that Liferay consumes.

We're doing this because we feel that the patterns we're solving with this aren't specific to Liferay, but are common across the web, and are useful for multiple people.

But this also allows non-Liferay developers to get involved and contribute ideas and solutions so that the pool of ideas doesn't stagnate, but is continually refreshed with fresh input.

However, as great as all of this sounds, there is one area where people people may be concerned, which is documentation.

We are currently working on generated API documentation (another benefit of YUI is that they release many of their build tools, one of them being their documentation builder), and we're aiming to have those done this week.

We also have quite a few demos available in the downloadable zip that contains examples along with code on the demo page to get them to run, but in all honesty, we could do a lot to improve them (and are in fact working on them).

There's also the YUI documentation on http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3 which all applies to Alloy (since Alloy is built on top of YUI, Alloy only adds to YUI and doesn't take anything away).

However, that can be a lot to wade through, so over the next two weeks, I'm going to post a series of 10 blog posts going over how to do tasks you're familiar with, as well as some that are brand new.

So here's what we'll learn:

1. Working with elements and events

2. Ajax

3. Plugins

4. Widgets

5. Utilities

6. Animation, Drag & Drop

7. Layouts & Forms in CSS

8. Using Alloy taglibs in JSPs

9. Advanced beauties (we'll look at DelayedTask, AOP, OverlayManager, Queue & AsyncQueue, and DataSet)

10. Odds and ends (a few like Char Counter, History, Cache, Profiler, and DataType parsing)

After all 10 posts, I'm hoping you'll have a more thorough understanding of Alloy, and hopefully some ideas on how it can help you.

These are going to be written from a very technical point of view, so if all of my talks so far have been too light on exact details, be prepared for actual code to make it's way in.

Looking forward to seeing you here!