The revolution started a few short years ago with Google's Gmail.
It's the web application that put WOW back into WWW.
It is truly the first web application that I would trade in my trusty e-mail client for. The decision to switch was a no brainer. Yahoo Mail didn't have POP. At that time, no free email hosting provider offered more than a measely 5MB of email storage. Outlook Express crashes at the sheer volume of e-mail I get everyday. Finally, searching thru hundreds to thousands of messages wasn't such a chore because it actually works !
Suddenly, more and more people were turning to their browsers to read mail, gradually weaning away from the desktop e-mail clients that they have become so use to.
After the e-mail client, is the file manager not too far away from the same fate ?
Probably not in the near future. As I have mentioned before, browsers need a little catching up before we can actually see that happening. Right now, for instance, if you want seamless dragging and dropping of files from your desktop to a web page, you have to rely on a java applet.
Click the title link above to see a demo I wrote of an ajax powered file manager (username:coa,password:123) that works on top of the robust OpenACS File Storage package.
I wouldn't call it innovative, in fact, it copies a lot of things from Windows Explorer but it has to start somewhere :-)
Great work Ham! Nice to see Ajax update on the file manager.
ReplyDeleteVery cool, when do you plan to integrate it in standard file storage (at least as an additional option).
ReplyDeleteOne Feature request: Filestorage should be able to check for space restrictions. (ie. 50MB for Community, changeable by siteadmin)
learn@wu has done something here but I don't know if it is commited to cvs.
I read in Openacs Forum that Solution Grove also has an Ajax Photo Album. Would it be possible to see this on your excelent demosite.
ReplyDelete@christian
ReplyDeleteThanks for visiting my blog and taking a look at the demo.
Ajax File storage is currently in OpenACS CVS Head. You can get a checkout from there. The package also have docs that tell you how to quickly modify the index.adp page of the file storage package so that you can use it in place of the old UI.
AjaxFS tries to use whatever tcl proc and/or sql that File Storage makes available. Once file storage supports it, I believe we can create a UI to check for it.
Unfortunately, the ajax photo album ui is currently being rewritten to use the same javascript library that ajaxfs is using and will not be available again for some time.
Stay tuned here and I will make the announcement once development has completed.
Thanks Again !