Ajaxio proof of concept for Ajax Visio functionality
June 1st, 2006I’ve been acquainted with James MacFarlane for a very, very long time. I first met him in the early 80s when he wrote articles and columns for various Toronto-based computer trade magazines and was active in the tech community. A few years ago, long before the Ajax revolution, he was managing a dev team at Moveable Inc and had me in to give a presentation to his staff about Remote Scripting and related techniques.
Always ahead of the curve, James is at it again with a new proof of concept called Ajaxio, that does Visio-style stuff in the browser. This is an excerpt from his demo page:
The purpose of this experiment is to see if a Visio-type of tool could be developed in a web browser. Using Prototype, script.aculo.us and Water Zorn’s SVG library I managed to hack together a simple demo. It’s not perfect, but it demonstrates that it can be done. There is no Ajax writeback to the server in this demo, but it could be easily added as a call in prototype.
Neat stuff.
(a repeat of my comment from Ajaxian)
I’ve been working on something similar for a while, too. The last full prototype is here (SVG/Firefox 1.5+ only):
http://www.xdraw.org/xdhTest.html
And I’m hoping to get the the cross-browser redo of the API into the dojo toolkit. A prototype of that effort is here:
http://www.xdraw.org/example_draw.html
This works in IE, Safari, and Firefox 1.5+. Note that it provides a unified API for SVG, VML, Canvas and DirectAnimation, and adding the Walter Zorn library should be straightforward.
Anybody interested in helping out should email me at gavin (that email symbol we all know but no longer put in addresses)
doughtie (the other symbol) com
Also, you might try mxGraph:
http://www.jgraph.com/mxgraph/
It’s another “visio in the browser” piece of work. The description of mxGraph is here:
http://www.jgraph.com/mxgraph.html
mxgraph is in beta and still starts at USD 3000 … you must be kidding me!