Another Quickr slide show - integrated Quickr and Connections
Category NoneRecently, Mac Guidera of IBM asked SNAPPS to help design an integrated Quickr system for use by IBM and Mid-Market Executives. In addition to the very important topic of branding, Mac's executives wanted a custom Welcome page that draws attention to recent content, lets a nontechnical manager create professional-looking announcements, and provides for integration with external sources like YouTube for richer presentation.
In addition to the custom Welcome page, the real challenge on this project was seamless integration with Lotus Connections using the REST API. Specifically, Mac wanted us to present users with Profiles content instead of the Quickr Member list, which is a simple list of people, email and phone numbers. And, it had to be dynamic - if the Quickr place manager added a new member, they should show up in the Profiles list automatically.
Viktor spent several weeks perfecting the techniques to make all this happen, and it's now implemented at IBM. He used Dojo (of course!) for the XHRs, without having to add anything to the server - since Quickr already ships with Dojo installed, he simply used what was there to make the Ajax calls and create the rich text areas.
This is a great example of integrated Quickr & Connections, and shows how a few moderately complex customizations can produce a great collaborative business application. I've annotated the slide show of screenshots with some comments - enjoy!
Comments
That would be totally cool if it weren't for the fact that Dojo is the TIMMY! of web projects. I know IBM has basically bet the farm on it, and in many other arenas, I'd say "Yay! Thery're serious about making this world-class."
But Dojo is just.... well... bad. At least compared to the alternatives. It's kinda like saying "we build a NeXTStep application!" Maybe in some narrow definition, that's really useful, but in the real world -- it doesn't mean anything because no one cares about the underlying platform.
If you want to compare browser development technologies, I suggest a really simple litmus test. Go to each of their homepages and click "Samples" (or "Examples") Try them.
Anyone that builds a righteous toolkit can make righteous examples of that tookit. (SNAPPS being a great case study, right?)
So what's the difference between the examples on, say, Dojo vs. the examples on, say, ExtJS?
Please, tell us here in your pages.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 12:15:35 AM On 12/22/2007 | - Website - |
No argument on the samples available on various sites. Maybe Alex & the various teams have been more focused on turning this into an enterprise toolset than the eye candy. And that's the reason for last year's 7 toolkits in our LS session. However, I do believe Dojo has long legs, and it's not "bad". The evidence is not in the sample code, it's in the list of sites and commercial applications that have adopted it. IBM is a big name to have put Dojo into several products. So if it's going to be there, might as well start showing Domino developers what they can do with it. XHRs and JSON calls are pretty darn easy and that's what we used it for here.
If I like ExtJS, I'll build something with it...no argument there. I do have 30 days left...
Posted by Rob Novak At 11:44:35 AM On 12/22/2007 | - Website - |