Open source is the lifeblood of the development community. It keeps innovation flowing and developers on top of their game. Google and Microsoft are both pushing heavily into the open source realm. Yahoo! today announced they’re throwing their hat in the ring as well.
Yahoo! announced today the availability of Mojito, an open source JavaScript framework developed with Web developers in mind. Their hope is that developers take Mojito and build high-end mobile experiences faster that lead to “better consumer engagement and better advertising impact to unlock more market opportunities.”
Mojito may sound new to you, but that’s just because this is the first time it’s being offered to the public. Yahoo! developers themselves have been using it to developer apps like Livestand, Fantasy Finance and Fantasy Premier League Football. So obviously Yahoo! likes Mojito a lot, but what about it will make developers interested in it?
Yahoo! reckons that developers are going to love the fact that Mojito is all JavaScript, all the time. Since JavaScript is one of the easier and widely used programming languages to learn, it gives an advantage to all developers. They also proclaim that it’s a true MVC framework. These are just the consolation prizes though as its main feature is being able to run on client and server side simultaneously.
This programming magic is enabled through NodeJS. It allows the Mojito framework to run on both ends of the spectrum. Yahoo! claims this allows developers to assemble and render data on both the server and client sides.
All of this sounds pretty nice, but Yahoo! wants it to be better. That’s why they’ve made Mojito open source. Letting developers directly at the code should help speed up the evolution of the framework from awesome to god-like.
To help developers get 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.
Is Yahoo’s latest foray into open source a good one? Will you be using Mojito in your applications? Let us know in the comments.
