As a software engineer, one usually spends a lot of time and intellectual effort on learning new stuff – languages, components, tools. With the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are lots of different ways of doing similar things. I’ve tended to keep hold of the tools and methods that I’m most familiar with. Notably, the suite of Prototype, Script.aculo.us and Behaviour libraries.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve become increasingly aware of Yahoo’s YUI Library. A substantial and growing collection of interface elements and manipulators that are, in some respects, astonishing. But the learning curve is great. Would I – could I – switch to this instead?

Probably not for existing projects. But for new ones it seems viable. Yesterday’s release of version 2.2 includes such goodies as a browser history manager and a component for building and manipulating data tables (including XHR support!)

But that’s not all.. because David Lindquist has just released a one-column version of a navigator that behaves similarly to Apple’s Column View, and there’s a multi-column version on the way. Gosh.