YUI 2.4.0 Released ...

The YUI library has one of the longest release cycles around but when they put out a release, the team definitely makes it worth it. Yahoo! just released YUI v2.4.0 with a host of new features that will surely please the YUI faithful.

New Selector Engine

In YUI 2.4.0, the Yahoo! team introduces it is first foray into providing a CSS selector engine, called the Selector Utility. Similar to other libraries such as jQuery and Prototype. the new class adds support for most pseudo-classes, attribute operators, and combinators as defined by the W3C. While most projects have focused on improving performance, the YUI team focused on ensuring str0ng selector support, an approach that definitely makes sense for this initial implementation.

Dustin Diaz has written up his thoughts on the selector engine and shows some examples such as:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

   1.
      
   2.
      var Y = YAHOO.util,
   3.
          Select = Y.Selector,
   4.
          Dom = Y.Dom;
   5.
      var collection = Select.query("#example p> span[lang^=us]");
   6.
      Dom.batch(collection, function(el) {
   7.
        // do stuff with el...
   8.
      });
   9.
      

YUI Charts Control

Getting some assistance from the Yahoo! Flash Platform team, YUI now adds support for charting. The control is a hybrid JavaScript/Flash component that supports bar, line, and pie charts and integrates with the YUI DataSource Utility for pulling data.

Profiler

When Yahoo! released YSlow, you knew they were serious about application performance and that is carried over into YUI with the new YUI Profiler.

    The new the YUI Profiler allows you to target specific code for profiling and to retrieve profiling data programmatically while your application is running — in any A-Grade browser. In combination with Nicholas’s YUI Test Utility, Profiler allows you to build unit tests in which success or failure is predicated on performance benchmarks.

JSON Utility

Leveraging Douglas Crockford’s JSON parser and stringify functionality, the YUI team created the new JSON Utility which provides improved methods for working with JSON. Tasks such as JSON-to-string and string-to-JSON conversion and validation are now a core part of the library which I am sure will make many developers very happy.

In addition to these great features, substantial enhancements have been made to the:

    * YUI Calendar Control.
    * YUI Button Class
    * Drag & Drop Utility API
    * YUI Rich Text Editor

A complete overview of the new features and changes Yahoo! just released YUI v2.4.0 can be seen at the YUI Blog.

YUI v2.4.0 is immediately available for download and the full documentation can found here.

Congrats to the YUI team!
source: ajaxian

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