[columbo]

I know Wells Fargo went full-bore with YUI to the point of creating their own derivative (http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2013/11/08/yuiconf-2013-an-amazi...)

I have to say, enterprise companies like WF really have it tough. With thousands of applications and tens-of-thousands of developers by the time they implement anything it's already been rendered obsolete.

At least they didn't go 100% Flex like some other companies

[drcode]

> I have to say, enterprise companies like WF really have it tough.

I will code up and play the worlds smallest violin in reactjs today in their honor.

[jgalt212]

go easy on the grave dancing. For every framework, there comes a day like this.

[nine_k]

If a framework goes away because a clearly better alternative crops up, it is called progress :-)

In 2006, YUI was a step forward compared to the general state of JS frameworks. Today ReactJS is a step forward compared to YUI. When something supplants ReactJS because it's clearly better, I hope, nostalgia aside, few people will protest.

[IgorPartola]

I will bet $5 that you never had the experience where you build on top of a platform or learn to rely on a product and suddenly it gets taken out to pasture. Nostalgia is one thing, but realizing that the application that you are supposed to support and develop for years to come is built on a platform that no longer exists really sucks. It sucks in very real, very pragmatic terms, and for all the progress we can make in the general sense, the specific case of it happening to you is not going to be much easier just because there are now better alternatives and you have an excuse to start from scratch.

[nawitus]

One way to reduce this risk is modularization. If development stops for a single module, it can be replaced quite painlessly compared to rewriting everything because one relied on a monolithic framework.

[IgorPartola]

Yes. The problem is that things like YUI (or Django, or NodeJS, or Rails) are not modules. These are frameworks where you plug your code in, not the other way around. And besides, the dictate the programming paradigm, not just variable names. You cannot create an abstraction layer on top of YUI that would work seamlessly for Angular or jQuery or straight DOM manipulation. They are completely different.

[Sivart13]

Calling ReactJS a step forward from YUI is an extremely applesy/orangey comparison. YUI was a full-fledged do-everything framework, React is more like a hyper-efficient templating language.

[cnp]

Not so with React; the baby has been (re)born, philosophically. It's not just another lib but an effective approach to problem solving in general.

[fiatjaf]

This day will never come for ReactJS.

[possibilistic]

So we'll be writing Javascript forever?

[tomjen3]

Well forever is a _really_ long time, but I wouldn't be too surprised. I mean we still have significant banking infrastructure running on Cobol.

Hopefully browsers will ship with native support for something better, in addition to javascript. A common virtual machine that you could run your code on would be awesome. You can kinda do that today, except JS makes a terrible VM spec.

[lupin_sansei]

Probably, as javascript will remain the browser's only supported scripting language forever as it's such a big hurdle to get all the browser makers to implement a new language. I imagine javascript in the browser will eventually be like x86 assembler though in that almost everybody will write in a higher level language like coffeescript, or through layers of libraries like jQuery.

[Lennie]

Reminds me of this talk:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

[rbanffy]

Oh no... I don't want to live in a world like that...

[joshmn]

Looking forward to it.

[Havvy]

Wells Fargo is big enough that they can spend resources maintaining their fork. Yahoo is no longer working on it, but if somebody else wants to pick it up, they can.

[SerpentJoe]

I worked at WF years ago on/around the WF-RIA project. They have the strongest frontend culture I've seen at any company before or since. I'm sure they'll be fine.

[rralian]

I also worked at WF and in my area (mutual funds) front-end was weak as hell. There were java developers, designers who still thought in points and "pixel perfect", and marketers, and just about nobody in-between. Granted this was a few years ago, but not long enough to excuse the ignorance. I can't speak too much about the rest of the company other than as a customer, and based on my experience as a customer, the front-end is weak as hell for everything else too.

[tsunamifury]

Its no longer the case. Although there mobile enterprise products moved away from YUI slowly over the past few years.

[pyrrhotech]

correct, Wells Fargo's market cap is 267 billion, 30% bigger than Facebook. They can pretty much do whatever they want

[scarmig]

They can do whatever they have the internal capacity to decide to do.

They're richer than Facebook, sure. But at many non-tech companies, spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to build a solid library is simply not in the cards. (Why should we spend so much on engineers? All they're doing is slapping together some HTML, my nephew in high school does that!)

[namityadav]

Surely WF's needs with YUI-fork (or any other similar library) will be limited enough that they'll need to hire just one or two developers. I don't see how they'll need to spend hundreds (or even tens) of millions of dollars to build a solid library. I don't think even Yahoo has spent that much on YUI in total.

[StavrosK]

Hah, it's funny that the place that handles your money is only worth 30% more than the place you chat with your friends.

[cookiecaper]

To be fair, Facebook and other recent social IPOs are grossly overvalued.

[dasil003]

Plus their "market"-share is significantly higher than Wells Fargo's.

[AJ007]

To be fair, banks may also be grossly overvalued. Their market valuations are entirely dependent on large government bailouts (although Wells Fargo was certainly in good shape relative to their peers in 08.)

[tripzilch]

> To be fair, banks may also be grossly overvalued.

In other words, such valuation of a big corporation has little to do with the direct utility to, or meaning for a single individual.

It's like a red blood-cell wondering why the eye is so highly valued compared to the liver.

[rbanffy]

> although Wells Fargo was certainly in good shape relative to their peers in 08

And this is the most ridiculous thing in those bailouts. You manage responsibly and competently and, in return, you get government funded competition.

There should be a better way.

[Alupis]

> Their market valuations are entirely dependent on large government bailouts

Hasn't been the case for years (and I'm pretty sure it was never the case actually). They are valued by their assets (funds in accounts, real estate holdings, equity in companies/investments, etc). Facebook's valuation appears to be based on nothing but magic.

[baddox]

Which, as always, is a completely meaningless claim.

[gohrt]

Good. They should be handling my money, not skimming it.

[Alupis]

> correct, Wells Fargo's market cap is 267 billion, 30% bigger than Facebook.

When did Facebook become the benchmark? Facebook is tiny compared to an awful lot of companies.

[lennel]

Flex (for better or worse) is still widely used in the financial space. We started using the full google closure stack a couple of years ago and I am happy about that decision everyday.

[bellerocky]

I was the person that initiated using the closure library for a team back in 2010. It took ages to release products using it, someone called it the "write more, do less" library and I have regretted the decision ever since, especially when Google came out with Angular which felt like a total slap in the face. Closure Library had half hearted support, and even teams inside Google hated it, which is why Angular probably came about. It felt like a slap because people that bet on Google supporting Closure couldn't just stop using it and start using Angular.

[DenisM]

I feel for you. Same thing happened earlier to me with Google Web Toolkit.

Frankly, it soured me on the whole third-party framework idea, seeing how it was impossible to predict which one will retain support over the years.

[lennel]

It depends on what your desired outcome is. Angular is not as solid, not as fast, nor is the whole product as able to be statically analyzed.

Longer term maintenance is a pleasure with closure, adding new features a breeze, there are tons of exceptionally well tested components and I cannot stress enough how wonderful deep static analysis and dead code elimination is.

[tomjen3]

I don't really think it is fair to compare Angular and Google closure.

Angular is basically MVVM for the web, which is awesome because MVVM is awesome.

Closure is OOP and "lets move heaven and earth to pretend we are still coding java, but with a weird syntax and lambda functions". It appeals to different needs.

[smackfu]

Isn't this the big advantage of open source and Javascript in general? Even if the creator abandons it, you should have enough development resources to at least maintain status quo.

[irae]

They chose YUI because of the current state of YUI and not because they believe on YUI future features anyway. So Yahoo bug fixes and security patches should be good enough for Wells Fargo for at least 1 year, maybe 3.

[SiVal]

That's not quite right. The advantage is that you (and others) are ALLOWED to do what you want with it (within license limits), but there's no guarantee that you have the resources to make use of that right. Even maintaining the status quo might require more resources than you have as the world evolves and bit rot sets in. It is nice, though, that open source leaves open the possibility that some other party can pick up the ball if the original developers drop it and you can't do it yourself.

[columbo]

Yeah it's the pro but the con (IMO) is that if you're the last active contributor then it has effectively become a custom framework... which nobody likes to support.

[JackFr]

Companies like Wells typically have governance policies and processes which expressly consider the scenario of the the open source 'vendor' ending development. Doesn't make it easier, but presumably someone considered the implications already.

[roel_v]

Has anyone reading this ever worked at a place that had something like this (and was more than a paper illusion)? I think you're being overtly optimistic of big companies' IT practices.

[georgemcbay]

IME, many big companies are so change-averse that an event like this is mostly irrelevant to their projects. Even if the external developer who was previously maintaining the library were still maintaining it, the project the big company is shipping would still be like 2-3 major versions behind with no immediate plans to upgrade.

Having access to the source and the legal ability to modify it without releasing rights to their own IP is the only issue I've really seen big companies be wary about when it comes to using external libraries, and practically speaking that's probably all they should be worried about.

[buckbova]

Working at a large pharmaceutical, I can assure you this is real. There's a governance structure that rivals the size and budget of a medium sized business' entire software team's.

[jvagner]

He's not being overly optimistic at all. That level of consideration is very real at big companies.

[tracker1]

Several years ago I worked on the redesign for the access request tools (ART in jQueryUI, and the backend system using ExtJS), it was a lot of fun, my understanding is ExtJS and YUI share some heritage. That said, I'm not really a fan of the likes of ext, yui or dojo... they're a bit bulky and unwieldy.

Today, I've been working more on Bootstrap, React, Flux, Webpack and a few other bits... It's getting nicer all the time. I'm really appreciating JS front to back over other systems (.Net, Java) in terms of actually getting stuff done. Higher testing is pretty much required for a larger JS system, but modularity, npm, git etc go a long way.

[yeukhon]

LinkedIn used to be YUI consumer too until 2-3 years ago they started moving away from it from what I heard.

Occasionally I still see YUI tutorials but to be honest, the usage is quite low. At least the number of "mentions" today.

[mildavw]

I interact with Wells for some backend services. The only interface they expose is an IE-only java applet. Can't say I'm surprised they are lagging the industry by a decade.