YUI2, YUI3, jQuery, something else? What to choose?

[Frédéric Buclin]

Hi everybody,

You probably know that Bugzilla currently uses YUI2 as its JS library,
but shiny new features are now only implemented in YUI3, which looks
like a very different library compared to YUI2. This means that if we
want to use new features implemented in YUI3, we basically have to
rewrite everything from scratch. As jQuery is a very popular library, I
wondered if it wouldn't be a better alternative than moving to YUI3.
More popular = potentially more contributors. Either that, or we could
stay on YUI2, but this means it would be a bigger pain to migrate in the
future once YUI2 is declared dead.

I talked with dkl and glob on IRC this week, and we plan to branch for
Bugzilla 4.4 soon, and open the new development cycle for Bugzilla 4.6.
The main focus for 4.4 was to improve WebServices, but I would like the
main focus for 4.6 to be the User Interface. More and more people are
complaining that Bugzilla looks old and is slow, while for instance
GitHub looks great, cleaner, faster, modern, easier to use, etc... The
question is not whether they are true or not (not everybody agree on
this point, and I don't want a debate here as we are all biased), but
the question is what can we do to improve the User Experience.

Nobody can object that the UI almost didn't change since the Bugzilla
2.x era, modulo some improvements here and there. The UI was built with
no JavaScript in mind, and I think this was a good thing. But now
finding the right threshold seems important in 2012, and AJAX and our
JSON-RPC interface could help us improve things now.


So, what's your opinion on the choice of the JS library? The tracking
bug on bmo is: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453268


LpSolit