How easy it’s to come up with a drag and drop web-based interface that’ll provide me features to wire objects together, setup configurations nicely in a modal window for each object? I’m looking for links that’ve any similar kind of interface, or articles on this. also, i’m looking for your technology/language suggestions.
Another way I’m thinking – as a desktop appln + browser dependent addon..
Is it good to create such an user-interface using XUL, which can be deployed as an addon on Firefox/as a stand-alone application in Windows? Are there any other similar things/technologies which can provide a basic framework for us to build on it further?
Why do I need this, finally?
..for building simple Workflows, for defining process flows, that can provide me some auto-generated xml content which I can use for further processing.
Thanks!
I’m quite interested in this, too.
I’ve flirted with HTML5’s DragDrop implementation – Quirksmode has Bad Things to say about that, so then I thought “Perhaps a JavaScript library can help me” – haven’t checked out jquery for this yet, but I have checked out YUI’s DragDrop, DragDropManager and DataSource, and its looking hopeful (consistent, reliable).
I tried things like adding an iframe on the fly to any document, to provide this kind of functionality without needing to add dependencies to the page given the iframe – mixed results, but in my case I was trying to cater for x-domain access, which proved difficult.
So I’d say JavaScript could be a winner – if designed poorly it could be difficult to manage resources though, if you want to potentially DragDrop/edit/config any element in a document – so watch out for that.
If you’re keen and able, Adobe AIR apps also look promising – but I can’t help with any more info on that, other than they’re Desktop Apps with great flexibility.
I’ma going to keep an eye on your Question, I look forward to any other Answers/comments!
EDIT: I forgot to mention Flex (aka Flash Builder 4, latest version) is quite easy to create stuff like this, though I’ve had exposure to Flash for a while. It comes with the standard Adobe caveats; price, libraries, support.