Friday 29 October 2004

UI Engine under the Hood of Fablusi v2

This is more a note to myself than a post for the general reader.

I read "Under Gmail's Hood" by Jon Udell via InfoWorld email just now.

I was amazed at the response of Gmail and this piece confirm that there is a Javascript UI engine loaded at the beginning of a Gmail session.

By luck, that is also the approach I took to give Fablusi V2 more responsiveness. I will need to study the Gmail UI engine to see if I can learn anything from it. The first thing I notice is that Gmail UI uses xmlHttpRequest to fetch data from the server. I chose to use a more traditional way, by opening a small pop up window and closing it after the transfer. Obviously, my method will be blocked by the pop-up blocker if you do not allow Fablusi web-site to issue pop-up.

There are many neat and nice UI features in Gmail which I may find useful. The big question is how much change I need to make in order to take advantage of the lessons I can learn from the study. Will keep the blog posted.

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