Whilst Christian’s talk was an introduction to the YUI posing the question Javascript Evolved?, it was fairly basic for anyone who’s used it in anger however it was a good talk, light hearted and well presented, ideally suited to the level of the audience. Christian took a straw poll of who had used the YUI to date and there seemed to be about 10 hands that went up around the room of about 70 attendees. This surprised me quite a bit as I thought it would have had a wider exposure – I’m sure it will after the presentation. For me it’s the enterprise approach to the framework model that is YUI that won out over the other libraries out there. One of Christians’ key points was that YUI is more than a library, in fact a true framework – JavaScript, CSS and widgets all available from a single source. The other thing I like about YUI is that it’s developed by Yahoo! – who set a high standard in terms of cross-browser compatibility as well as understanding the nature of scalable solutions for their own sites. I’m looking forward to getting into the new features of the latest release of YUI version 2.5.0 out today! I hope that the new version doesn’t break too much as I’m just in the testing phase of a project with a client and would like to get the new version in before it goes live – we shall see. If you missed the event, then Christian’s slides are available on-line.

The man from Yahoo! also kindly brought some promotional merchandise along to the event – we all were then invited to put our names in a hat and a draw was then held. To my surprise my name was called out third and better than the t-shirts and beach balls that were won by some, I’d won one of the two copies of Christian’s own book: Web Development Solutions – Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy (published by Friends of Ed from Apress). I shall look forward to getting into that once I’ve finished my current read: Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 also from the same stable.

Alongside our own clients we continue to service other firms in the New Media sector, especially where they don’t have the high-level technical skills in-house to deliver application level projects. This has recently resulted in a situation where we’ve signed an out-sourcing deal with a local marketing and design house. We now undertake their high-end projects on behalf of their clients – they get to provide best-of-breed approaches to them and the code developed is sound internally rather than creating a bunch of maintenance headaches as previously. For us it means we drive the direction of the code used and know things are backed up properly and we can keep the version control of the sites developed under a tighter reign. I’ve got a meeting next month that may result in a similar approach by an SEO / Accessability company from the South – so you never know, might be announcing more growth soon