So you define a grid like a HTML table + href
<grid href=”http://server/zimbra/user/roland/calendar” width=”100%” />

Some of us don’t have enough time in the world to really learn/understand how to use Ajax, even though we understand it in principle/concept.

Also, unfortunately, most Ajax demos/examples are trivial things like sliding windows instead of real things that real people and websites can actually USE.

Until Ajax becomes available with better tools and useful examples, it will be for programmers only.

Thank you for reading this, Tom

First off, I think this article is great for the developer/engineering community and it is right on track that tools and services need to be made to enable lower-level technicians use AJAX. I think this was done really well by Dreamweaver for example when they incorporated basic JS scripts/Behaviors into the core of the application and I can imagine that in version 9 of studio they’ll do the same thing. I know this isn’t a very Open Source option, but this community is NOT an Open Source community right now, no?

Ok, now to my real point. What I was hoping for when I got here was really an AJAX for Designers. Real designers (interaction design, GUI design, InfoArch, User Experience).

There have been some attempts to create patterns for AJAX at http://ajaxpatterns.org and I also wrote a piecee called AJAX for Designers which you can get from http://synapticburn.com/comments.php?id=97_0_1_0_C

When I speak of design, I mean to say how to use the technology, not from a programatic perspective, but from an application standpoint. Where, when and why to even use it, and what can it offer. These are important issues that the design community including the community you were trying to address need to understand. Usabiliyt is another huge concern, as well as accessibility.

I have been using hidden div tags to define templates, so that dynamic sections of the site can be written in Dreamweaver, and the JS writer just has to look at the .innerHTML of the div and do a string replace on VARIABLE names.

The View Assembly tool allows for replacing plain HTML elements found in the source with other HTML/CSS/JavaScript. New tags can be defined too that encapsulate a set of HTML/CSS/JavaScript to include.

You could define tags for your Zimbra AjaxTK widgets to give UI developers an easy wrapper for the widgets. If you wanted to override all button elements with your own custom button widget, you could do that too.

It works well with existing source. You don’t need to modify the source to run it through the View Assembly tool, just provide a separate XML configuration file that tells the tool what tags to process. The HTML does not have to be XML conformant (but the tags to be processed have to match one of the supported syntaxes). It is a developer “compile-time” tool: it should be run offline, before pushing the code out to the web server/application server.

Because it runs offline and it only processes tags/syntaxes that you define in the configuration file, it plays nice with PHP/ASP/JSP code.