First Rough Cut Is Here
Last night I made a few tweaks round the back and rolled out v6.4 of this site, featuring the new Rough Cuts section, which you all seemed in favour of yesterday.
As a treat I made the first Rough Cut something that I think you will all like. It's Web 2.0 meets Domino. All the trappings of Web 2.0 are in there - Ajax, fancy DHTML widgets and, of course, YFT.
In a nutshell the technique shows how you can use Ajax to update the sort order of child documents by drag-dropping them within the parent. The example I use is a Newsletter scenario but I'm sure there are other places it could be used.
So, if you haven't already, have a play with the demo and read all about it in the Drag-n-Drop Sorting of Documents article.
I think I see a future for this new section of the site and can imagine all future articles passing through there (well, at least the long ones anyway). This drag-drop-sorting article would have been typical of other ideas I've had for articles in the past. I'd have the demo app zipped up and available online. There'd be a draft document sketched out. That would be where it would stay for ages though, sometimes maybe never seeing the light of day. With the Rough Cut section I can get useful code to you without you having to wait for me to write a lengthy article.
I appreciate some of you still want/need that lengthy article and so I'll try and actually finish this one off some time soon. In the mean time I will also try and get a couple more Rough Cuts up here.
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Jake
The Rough Cut looks great and works great. Nice job.
This really kicks, Jake. Since I started frequenting your site I know Domino can be cool, too. I really appreciate your work, although I'm mostly a silent reader on here.
Jumping on the band wagon, the new Rough Cuts section is great. Can't wait to play with this version of drag n' drop as I've been playing with the Yahoo! one.
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Doug. You don't have to wait. The download is in the article.
I started out with the YUI one too, but the script.aculo.us one just seemed much more lightweight.
Jake: Just quickly looked through the database design and I completely agree about script.aculo.us being lighter. Also, with your implementation using Prototype.js, it's a great way for those to see its power if they have not yet used it.
Keep the ideas flowing!
Doug. The beauty of script.aculo.us is that it's an extension to prototype.js, which I was using anyway, so I'm saving space in two ways really.
Using prototype.js means I have all the Ajax niceness to play with to boot. Using script.aculo.us means I have sortable lists and YFT at hand too.
Together they are a great combination and I'd consider adding them to all my apps from now on.
Jake, Love the new Rough Cuts section - great idea.
I broke the Ajax demo though. If you quickly change the order of items, the YFT gets stuck as permanently on. Possibly the sort of the doesn't pan out either. Such is the stateless nature of the web. But its an important lesson to learn for those wishing to deploy those great 2.0 features.
Dave. What's needed is a way to disable the drag-n-drop while the Ajax part is busy. Should be possible. I'll try and look in to it.
You're right though, using Web 2.0 niceties like this has its problems.
Awesome, Jake-- thanks for the demo.
There is another js library that builds upon prototype.js and adds widgets and eye-candy. It's called Rico {Link}
I'm mentioning it because it includes interesting tool called LiveGrid {Link}
From their site: "In this demo, we connect an HTML table to a Movies database. The database currently has around 1000 movies. Since the table only pulls in the data as-needed we could have had tens of thousands of movies and still experienced similar performance."
It allows us Domino developers to build web views that closely resemble Notes client views. And it allows sorting, too.
i would be careful of any kind of praise you give o'reilly for their 'rough cuts' policy. there are two problems with it:
1. oreilly's safari department fails to offer books on important topics to regular safari subscribers, unless the subscribers are willing to pay extra for the material. oreilly's coverage of introductory material on ajax is a good example.
2. the 'rough cuts' policy invites people to make contributions to a book, and then charges them for the 'privilege' of doing so.