Posted by kranklin on March 21, 2008 at 8:05am
This is an Adobe AIR application for managing your Drupal site, and since the newest version of fckeditor (beta right now) will work in Adobe AIR, it could also be used for changing and adding content on the site.
For those who don't know, Air makes it easy(ier) for web developers to make desktop applications by using languages you are already familiar with such as HTML and Javascript
Comments
Questions
What will be the advantage of AIR™ in comparison with the existing web browser solution (which also makes it easy to use languages such as HTML and JavaScript), and also has (optional) FCKEditor, TinyMCE and other WYSIWYG editor support? Can AIR™ reuse components of the site itself or does everything in the admin and editing interface have to be written?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of desktop applications and integration of desktop with web stuff, but at the moment I can't see the use case for this. Also, I question why we should support a proprietary lock-in solution like Adobe® AIR™ when free desktop application frameworks like Trolltech Qt provide similar support for HTML/JavaScript (powered by WebKit) or standalone JavaScript for application scripting.
is it really necessary to put a "TM" next to every mention?
Are they really going to sue because you didn't put a copyright next to their name? It seems pretty silly to me...
To be honest I wouldn't even look at it just because you wrote it like that. Maybe it's just me, but I'm here for OPEN SOURCE technologies, not marketing BS.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
proprietary
he probably wanted to emphasize the proprietary nature of the matter in question
I like the idea but I don't
I like the idea but I don't think it has to be AIR - the front end could be anything that does xmlrpc, json, soap, etc. if this is integrated with the Services module - a lot services would need to be written for Drupal so that would be a big win from the SOC project. The student could do AIR as the proof of concept but anyone else could leverage this how they want (C#, Python, JS, anything that can do a service protocol). In fact, using the json_server it might be then really easy to add some ajax improved admin pages into drupal for configuring a site with out form/post/refresh/repeat. Like adding taxonomy terms without a page refresh.
Think beyond AIR and more about the idea.
+1 for me.
Dan DeGeest
Software Developer
Somewhere or Another
Yes, the hardest part will
Yes, the hardest part will be the services side. I'd welcome a proposal on building up the services needed to support such an app (but the app itself is too wide a scope).
A lot of features come to mind. Such an app would likely support off-line edits, so the services api would need to be able to synchronise changes.
How about narrowing the scope first?
How about we narrow the scope?
This would mean:
Optional: synchronize edits within specific nodes.
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What we could do
Google gears... anyone?
Also, AIR is cross-platform.
... and, you should check out json_server.
+1 for Google Gears
I don't know how difficult or feasible it would be to integrate Google Gears with Drupal, but it sure would be nice to be able to make offline updates to a site and propagate them to Drupal when re-connected. That would be more useful to me than a desktop client.
Google Gears and AIR on
Google Gears and AIR on basically the same conceptually - again, its more about the idea then the client side technology - heck, write the client in the new iPhone SDK and we can do all this from our phones (or Android if you want to stick with Google).
Still a +1 idea for me.
Dan DeGeest
Software Developer
Somewhere or Another
existing work
I swear I wrote this earlier, but please see http://drupal.org/project/drupman
It attempted (attempts?) to achieve this in XUL. Perhaps you could drive that home to add features and make it an awesome application?
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This looks like a similar
This looks like a similar idea but it implements its own back end services and assumes XML-RPC - it implements many of the things already in services like taxonomy and node RPCs. I still contend the bulk of this project would be flushing out missing services required for admin tasks and potentially many other services. Adding SimpleTest support, which we agreed and Drupalcon Boston, would be strongly encouraged by mentors for all projects would make for a really nice package. I really think Services, with its protocol independent approach, is the way to go and AIR is a suitable client side framework that could demonstrate JSON, XML-RPC, AMFPHP, REST, or any other Services server if the student feels comfortable with that tool already.
If someone wants to do XUL I really liked the idea of adding support for the theme developer module directly into FireBug - http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/FirebugInternals - so that you can get that modules output in a FireBug tab just like the DOM, Layout, CSS and other stuff FireBug does natively.
Dan DeGeest
Software Developer
Somewhere or Another
Google gears for DRUPAL
Google gears would make things offline as long as the application has HTML,CSS and Javascript only. Making anything that has PHP would be a tricky one.
While working on a project that required offline handles, we have developed an application using Javascript and are now making it offline using Google Gears.
As an update, today, in the Google Developer Conference in San Francisco, I spoke to the Google Gears team about it and they might have much more coming. in the future.
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Updates, por favor?
Any update(s) to this approach? I'm looking for established ways of working with Drupal-based content when a net connection fails. Having a robust caching mechanism would allow Drupal to serve mission-critical data in a prospective project of mine, otherwise I'm coding (much) more.
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