If you have a chance to check out the site, or play around, we'd love to hear any feedback :)
I've got some questions, if you've got the time...
* Why YUI? When I think of YUI, I tend to think "overkill". Obviously you've done a ton of work on this since 2009; is there anything you couldn't have accomplished building this on top of jQuery (just as an example)?
* Does AlloyUI play well with others? For instance, if I wanted to incorporate one or two of your widgets in a UI built on top of Bootstrap or Foundation, would I run into trouble? What of MV* frameworks (Ember, Angular, etc.), or just plain-vanella jQuery?
* Testing this out on an iPad I found that some widgets seem to work well (calendar), but others (photo crop) not so much. Do you intend to target touch devices?
* You have a code editor, and a toolbar that seems intended for a rich text editor, but I don't see a rich text editor included. Do you have plans to add a rich text editor? Especially because YUI3's rich text editor is very limited out of the box, this would seem to be a great addition.
We ended up using basic JSPs or servlets, depending on the portlet use case, with the bulk of UI done with jQuery and custom components provided by a designer company.
For this reason I refuse to use a non-complete library (where as lots of UI elements are missing such as this one). If I'll have to fill the missing parts with other frameworks I won't use it at the very beginning.
I think people underestimate the importance of a snappy fast interface. We use bootstrap + handlebars and get really fast response, at the cost of having to build a lot ourselves.
1) The loader[1]. The ability to load modules on demand help a lot with reducing the initial kweight of your page. The loader supports very easily concatenation of scripts which has a huge impact in perceived performance. It also does conditional loading, which means that it doesn't load compatibility code for old browsers when it isn't necessary.
2) You also get the flavor of templates you like. They come bundled with Handlebars and Template.Micro[2], a very light and fast template engine similar to Underscore templates.
[1] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/yui/#dynamic-loading-with-use
[2] http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/template/#using-templatemicro
Edit: Wow, I really like the diagram builder. I've been looking for something like this for almost a year.
