Yahoo Mixes 'Cocktails' Web Development FrameworksYahoo Mixes 'Cocktails' Web Development Frameworks

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After a long period of internal turmoil, Yahoo appears to be ready to compete again for the hearts and minds of developers. The company Wednesday introduced Cocktails, a set of Web development frameworks for simplifying the creation and deployment of Web applications.

Yahoo uses the term Cocktails to describe a mix of HTML5, Node.js, CSS3, and JavaScript. The company is announcing two Cocktails: Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan.

Mojito is a Web app framework that allows developers to write JavaScript code that can run equally well in browsers or on servers. "With Mojito, developers will no longer have to write different code for the server backend and browser frontend," explained Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, Yahoo platform architect, in a blog post. Mojito allows, for example, Web apps that run on a cloud server when the user's browser blocks JavaScript.

[In other Web application news, Zynga has released an open source audio library.]

Fernandez-Ruiz describes apps written with Mojito, called Mojits, as modular widgets. Mojits encapsulate business logic and user interface (UI). In conjunction with YUI3 for Cocktails, Mojits are extremely portable: They can be run in the browser, in a hybrid native/Web runtime, or on a server.

Yahoo Manhattan aims to be that server. It's a cloud JavaScript hosting environment for Mojito-based applications, one that provides developers with an interface for deploying and managing Mojito-based applications. It's a platform that promises the stability, scalability, availability, security, and performance that serious developers demand from a service provider.

The Livestand app that Yahoo released in the iTunes App Store offers a glimpse of what's possible with Mojito and Manhattan.

Yahoo plans to make Mojito available as open source through the Yahoo Developer Network in the first quarter of 2012. The company expects to make Yahoo Manhattan available to publishers later in 2012.