Sunnyvale, California — Open source is the crux of the development community in today’s technology space where web applications is a booming segment. In order to keep pace with its rivals, Yahoo early this week announced the availability of Mojito, an open source JavaScript framework developed with Web developers in mind, which is part of its Cocktails set of offerings.
The web pioneer hopes that making the Mojito technology available for the first time will empower developers to deliver rich and personalized digital media experiences that can run on all major devices and platforms, including smartphones, PCs, iOS and Android, leading to ‘better consumer engagement and better advertising impact to unlock more market opportunities’.
While Web app frameworks are nothing new, Yahoo officials claims that currently developers do not have a firm method for delivering first-class digital media experiences to all popular consumer devices, without having to create applications specific to each device, which is slow and expensive.
Emphasizing further, the company also mentions that Mojito is special because it addresses the problem of delivering content to devices that have weak or erratic connections, said Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect with Yahoo’s platform technology group.
Besides, some existing technologies that attempts to rectify this problem are proprietary–locking developers to vendors, said Ren Waldura, Yahoo’s senior product manager for Cocktails.
Whereas, “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.
Because Mojito is devised in one language, JavaScript, for client and server environments, developers enjoy increased productivity-only one code-base to test and fix. Yahoo! believes that developers are going to appreciate the fact that Mojito is all JavaScript, all the time. And since its release, Yahoo developers themselves have been utilizing it to create apps like Livestand, Fantasy Finance and Fantasy Premier League Football.
Added Waldura in his post:
In fact, Mojito may appear new to you, but it is only because this is the first time it is being made available to the public. Also, JavaScript is one of the easier and widely used programming languages to learn, it gives an advantage to all developers. However, Mojito brings something new and unique to the table.
Moreover, developers use Mojito to create apps using Javascript, HTML and CSS that can run both on the client, using an embedded Javascript engine, and on the server, using the emerging Node.js platform. That means that if bandwidth is limited, an app can switch between rendering on the client and rendering on the server, providing a better experience for the user, Fernandez-Ruiz said.
Google and Microsoft are both pushing heavily into the open source realm. Hence, Yahoo has struggled to compete with Google and to return to the Internet leadership position it once held.
Now, 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. That could make developers wary of jumping on board a new platform from the company.
“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.
To help developers reach there, Yahoo! has uploaded the source code to GitHub. They have also created a handy page that details what Mojito can currently do for you.