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Ajax in Plone
Some thoughts sparked by the recent Bern Ajax Sprint, including my thoughts about low-hanging fruits for Ajax-ification in Plone.
It's very exciting to read Godefroid Chappelle's write-up of the recent Bern Ajax Sprint, even though I must confess that there are large swaths of it I don't really understand that well. Which brings me to the questions that are on my mind as a follower-from-afar:
What relationship (if any) is there between Kukit/Azax framework and existing Ajax libraries such as mochikit, scriptaculous, etc.? Does Kukit/Azax reinvent these wheels, or does it provide a lower-level framework within which these libraries can be later used? Or is this not even a relevant question?
What I'm really getting at is: what, if any, of the massive amount of Ajax work going on "out there" can or should Plone & Zope re-use?
Ooh... shiny. Now what?
OK, so we can now do Ajax-stuff in Plone. What are we gonna do with it? Here are my top-of-mind ideas, things that I think would have a big impact on everyday usability and performance.
- Drag-and-drop. Using Plone would get a lot nicer if the following UI elements supported drag-and-drop via Ajax:
- Folder ordering
- Moving items between folders
- File and image uploads
- Switch between tab items without reloading the entire page. E.g., switch from view to edit to properties to sharing.
- Click-to-edit operations in folder_contents view. Things like: renaming, changing states, etc.
- Could pages that are being edited be auto-saved (without destroying the ability to cancel edits)?
What am I overlooking here? What are Plone's low-hanging Ajax fruits?
Thanks for clarifying!
It seems like you're doing some really cool work -- I'm looking forward to installing the demos next week.
reinvent the wheels ?
> What relationship (if any) is there between Kukit/Azax framework and existing Ajax libraries such as > mochikit, scriptaculous, etc.? Does Kukit/Azax reinvent these wheels, or does it provide a lower-level > framework within which these libraries can be later used? Or is this not even a relevant question?
> What I'm really getting at is: what, if any, of the massive amount of Ajax work going on "out there" can > or should Plone & Zope re-use?
I really try to not reinvent the wheels : the problem imho is that most of the Ajax work out there is not trying to achieve my main objective, which is to avoid js programming outside the engine itself. If I understood the efforts I looked at (I did not see everything), those works try to ease js (and ajax) programming, not to avoid it.
I know that some of the complex uses cases wont be solvable with the model-free engine I envision (at least not before the engine gets used and improved) but I think it is already a good step if most simple use cases can be achieved without writing js (outside tuning the engine).
So I think kukit.js (or its descendant if we change the name) will reuse some of the work done by other Ajax work (Mochikit in particular) as it will ease its development.
HTH