Lucky guy

I have finally made it : having a gmail-like interface for the futur CPS webmail.

The challenge was to be able to :

• Save the editor message without reloading the page
• Be able to make changes on the page without reloading it with informations given by the server
• Have autocompletion/changes features with no reloading
  

Like gmail does, I have used XmlHttpRequest.

How does it work

XMLHttpRequest is a feature present in all navigators, it enables you to make GET and POST on the server from the page.

For example, you can send a POST request and parse the returned result.

That's what has been done for the webmail, to save for example, the message body when the user wants to attach a file.

Making a CPS library out of it

There are many uses cases where XmlHttpRequest can radically change your UI behaving, making it way better.

Examples :

• on the fly grammar corrections in the webmail editor
  
• form validations without page reloading ! (the famous div error)
  
• and many more things

CPSMailAccess will release a javascript library on the top of xmlhttprequest to provide a simple way to use this feature within Zope.
 

I have found insteresting materials for my ergonomy researches, besides
 Stéfane's link:

The Psychology of Menu Selection: Designing Cognitive Control at the Human/Computer Interface

http://www.lap.umd.edu/poms/

oldie but goodie : quite a few things that can be reused in web ergonomy

Card Sorting (very interesting)
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cardsorting/

More ntranet organization papers :  http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/index.php?subject=intranets

you can run test covering directly with zopectl this way :

zopect test -T -vv --dir /my/tests/dir/

it will create a cover folder with all covering infos

it renders % of cover also.

though, the render is not as "good looking" as CPS's cover.py (and this might be recoded sometimes)

A semantic web catalog that indexes RDF, based on rdflib

made for Zope2/Zope3

http://zemantic.org./

Did you notice how fast GMail is ?

It uses some Javascripts that enables the navigator to update the interface without calling the server.

Html content is sent once for all and, depending on user manipulations, the interface is updated on client side.

This reduces server calls to datas and makes the interface very fast, like a rich client.

It is done using an object available and implemented in all navigators : XmlHttpRequest.

Mmm, this could be the next CPS GUI model maybe, but how to deal with accessibility ?

I have added french support into TextIndexNG2 that makes query usable with "ET" "OU" "PAS" "PRES" words.

I have commited it in the sourceforge cvs so, until the next official release Andreas Jung will make, you can get it there :

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/textindexng/TextIndexNG2/