Yahoo Open Sources Mojito JavaScript Framework

Yahoo has given developers the chance to deliver personalised digital experiences to multiple consumer devices and platforms – with a single set of code – after it open-sourced Mojito.

Yahoo officials said currently developers do not have a method for delivering high quality digital media experiences to all popular consumer devices, without having to create applications specific to each device, which is slow and expensive.

Cocktail Hour

And existing technologies that try to solve this problem are proprietary – locking developers to vendors, said Ren Waldura, Yahoo’s senior product manager for Cocktails.

“Cocktails” is a mix of HTML5, Node.JS, CSS3, JavaScript and a lot of ingenious, creative mind-bending tricks from Yahoo’s engineers. In November, Yahoo announced two Cocktails: Mojito, an environment-agnostic JavaScript Web application framework, and Yahoo Manhattan, a hosted platform for Mojito-based applications.

Open-sourcing Mojito marks a major milestone in Yahoo’s commitment to sharing innovative technologies and driving standards for the open, mobile Web, the company said.

Because Mojito is built in one language, JavaScript, for client and server environments, developers enjoy increased productivity‑only one code-base to test and fix. And as part of Yahoo’s broader Cocktails mobile development platform featuring HTML5 and Node.JS, Mojito is already powering Yahoo products like Livestand, Fantasy Finance, Premier League Fantasy Football and Search Direct.

Mojito officially launched at JSConf 2012 on 2 April in Scottsdale, Ariz., where Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, Yahoo’s chief platform architect, will be presenting. Developers can now access Mojito via GitHub and begin testing, building and optimizing their own cross-platform applications.

“By releasing Mojito to the developer community, we are looking to enable digital media developers to build higher-end mobile experiences faster, leading to better consumer engagement and better advertising impact to unlock more market opportunities,” Waldura said.

Client/Server Blur

Added Waldura in his post:

JavaScript frameworks are nothing new. We know there are already a number of them out there. However, Mojito brings something new and unique to the table.

• Mojito is all JavaScript, that’s good. JavaScript is the single most widely available programming language today, and that’s something worth taking advantage of.
• Mojito is a true MVC framework, that’s better! MVC is a battle-tested design pattern, having proven its usefulness in desktop apps, in server-side apps, in, today, rich client-side applications. Those who ignore MVC … often reinvent it.
• But the best part of Mojito is its ability to “blur” the client/server boundary, to let you write your code that runs on the client, or the server. Or both.

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