July 12, 2007 at 1:36 pm · Filed under Tech, Javeline
In the Ajax rich world of today drag&drop has grown to be it’s hallmark as well as a source of great annoyance among interaction designers. However it may be, drag&drop is an absolute requirement for any mature framework. Whilst working on Javeline PlatForm, Javeline’s Ajax framework, I noticed there are two distinct ways of dropping; a basic and advanced way. Looking at several Ajax frameworks I didn’t find the advanced drag&drop implementation and after a lot of blood, sweat and tears, I know why.
The simple dropping mechanism consists of finding a previously registered drop target by its coordinates and then notifying the handler of the drop action via some event system. This works quite well for simple containers that are positioned fully visible on the screen to drop an item on. For instance a simple shopping cart container.
Now, imagine something is dragged to a container already containing elements. Let say we want the dragged element to be inserted before the element we are currently hovering over. It’s clear that this needs a more advanced solution; we need to know which child element we were hovering over. Similar problems arise when the drop targets are movable (think of an application with windows for instance); drop containers can overlap eachother which cause problems for the basic system.
fig 1. Basic / Advanced Drag&Drop
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July 8, 2007 at 6:24 pm · Filed under Announcements
Since my last article on the XPath/XSLT implementation for Safari I’ve came in contact with Jean-Sebastien Baklouti of mapbuilder and through him with Manos from Sarissa. Sarissa is a very good open source compatibility library. In agreement with them I’ve changed the XSLT/XPath library to fit in with Sarissa and make it an official package. It is now available for download here.
The package contains working examples and several functions have been added to the XSLT implementation. Jean-Sebastien is very busy adding new functions. You can follow his progress by adding yourself to the Javeline Internals Mailinglist.
July 4, 2007 at 2:45 pm · Filed under Announcements
After 4 months of incredible hard work the new javeline website is online together with it’s connected sites. We created several movies to explain to a larger audience what the benefits are for using Javeline PlatForm, DeskRun and OnEdit. Check out the movies using the following links:
PlatForm (Devs): http://www.javeline.com/product-platform.php?video=PF|0
PlatForm (Enterprise): http://www.javeline.com/product-platform.php?video=PF|1
DeskRun: http://www.javeline.com/product-deskrun.php?video=DR|0
OnEdit: http://www.javeline.com/product-onedit.php?video=OE|0
The website contains a lot of texts explain the concepts and benefits of the products. Especially for the devs that want to use the open source software we’ve set up http://developer.javeline.com. It has downloads as well as links to all sorts of articles, tutorials etc. Bugs can be placed in the bugtracker. I will enter my list of bugs in there next week.
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