by cooldog on Sat Jun 17, 2006 3:50 am Steve,
Are you familiar with Ajax ?
As I was playing with my Progear looking at the Xlobby web server, it suddenly occurred to me that you could make Xlobby via web absolutely *shine* with a modest amount of Ajax usage.
In case you aren't familiar with it, here's a link: http://ajax.org
Basically, you use javascript to make method calls via Ajax in your server ... and what you get is the ability to *NOT* have to do a complete HTTP transaction with the server, nor a complete page redraw ... you just use Ajax to ask the server for something, it replies, and then you have the javascript on the same page deal with whatever display changes are necessary. Ajax can make a web-based application look an awful lot like a host-based app.
As an example, imagine navigating through the list of albums, while never doing a page reload --- just requesting the next batch of images, and loading ONLY those, via javascript.
From their home page:
AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. AJAX is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. AJAX is the logical next step in the services-oriented architecture revolution. With AJAX, user interfaces from within the browser can use web services as their data source to store and retrieve information.
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is not a technology in itself, but is a term that describes a "new" approach to using a number of existing technologies together, including: HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, The Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and the XMLHttpRequest object. When these technologies are combined in the AJAX model, web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. This makes the application faster and more responsive to user actions.
The Girder manual has a section on this, "7.3 Client-side Scripting with Ajax", which is also worth a look.
If you are interested, I can hook you up with one of my guys who has done a good bit of work with it on the site that I manage development for. I was absolutely *amazed* at what he was able to accomplish --- essentially blowing away much of the traditional gotchas and "can't do thats" of web design. In ten minutes I'm sure he could give you a couple of examples you could use in Xlobby that would make your head spin...
Paul
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