JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Random Technical Stuff…

There was a Hack Day at Yahoo! today. Yahoo! Hack Day is a day long event where programmers present innovative applications and mashups built using Yahoo! web services and products. Developers start working on their application twenty four hours before the presentation which was Monday noon this time. If you are participating you can work on the project regardless of your day to day work. Today there were one hundred and thirty hacks presented.

This was a first Hack Day presentation for me. I developed a hack called Apartments on Yahoo! Map. I built this using Y! Maps, Y! Pipes, Y! Answers and craigslist apartment listings. The way it works is—after user selects a city; script pulls apartment listings RSS feed from craigslist. This RSS feed is ran through Y! Pipes to extract the location information. Once I have the location information, I am plotting every apartment location on Y! Map using Maps API. This hack also uses answers API to query real-estate and apartments related questions asked by Yahoo users. See it in action here.

I have been reading a lot about YUI and I attended several training sessions on it too. I have been looking for a chance to develop something using YUI but never got it. Recently I used this open source library for developing “Star Rating Module”. In the past I have played with Dojo and developed some stuff with scriptaculous but I like YUI the most.

Another cool thing about this library is you can use library files served from Yahoo! servers. You can simply reference YUI Javascript and CSS files in your application from Yahoo servers. Since the files are hosted on Yahoo! you get advantages such as fast response times, optimized caching, and use of gzip compression. YUI is a great resource for small companies who develop web-based applications with rich user interface but don’t want to spend time and resources in developing JS components from scratch because of shorter timelines.