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I am using global functions in my js file and inside those functions I am using YUI by adding YUI.use(module, function(){}). This I have to add in all the functions. I want to know if this is the right design. Every time my function is called, it will create a new instance of YUI is what I believe. And that will be in memory till it is garbage collected.

Also by doing this my function will take extra processing time for creating YUI instance. Is it right to create a global Y object and use it in the functions. I tried that but I wouldn't know if all the modules specified in YUI.use are loaded or not when my function is called as they happen asynchronously. This will happen when I am calling the function on page load.

In general, globals are bad, but there are times when it's unavoidable (for whatever reason), and if you can guarantee that the function name is unique, there's rarely any issue.

One thing I created (because we had a lot of these issues with legacy code) was to create YUI.provide: https://github.com/natecavanaugh/yui-provide

Basically, what id does is allows you to create functions that will load their dependencies, but will only go through the YUI use once, and it will do it only when the function is called.

So if you define a function, but never call it on that page, it won't download any dependencies.

The first argument to the provide function is an object, so you can use this for any method, even ones that are namespaced to a specific object.

HTH,