Intro

It may not have a lot of what it is thought at the moment that a Web 2.0 application must have, but enough that I think it is. The application I talk about is my latest project, a bookmarks manager: MyLinkVault.com.

Application features

No. It is not a new del.icio.us-like site. There are a bunch of differences. One of the most important is that the bookmarks are not public, nor have the option to make them public. Your bookmarks are private.

The most important feature, I think, is the unobtrusive degradable behaviour layer of Javascript and AJAX. Exactly as I said, if Javascript is enabled then the bookmarks appear in a customizable way 3 column format, just as Google's Personalized homepage. You can drag-n-drop categories of bookmarks and even bookmarks themselves and arrange them as you wish. Every time you drag something it will be saved on-the-spot, so next time you will open the application everything will look the same. The same thing happens for every option there is available: renaming, deleting, ordering, creating - everything gets saved on the server as you perform it.

If you disabled the Javascript on your browser or your browser is not yet supported, than it will degrade nicely to a usable non-javascript version of the application. So this way you can use it no matter what. There is also an option in the settings which allows you to always access the non-javascript version.

Technology used

This isn't the first time I have used AJAX, as I have used it before on creating a Bucharest map and on a more recent site I worked on (more details about it later).

From the first project I worked on with the AJAX technology I choose the Jpspan library that enables you to easily access your PHP apis from Javascript. With a bit of modifications made to it I managed to make it even more easy to adapt it to different projects.

For the drag-n-drop part of the site I used a modified version of yp's DOM-Drag. The original script did not offer an option do prevent the dragging from starting. I modified it so you can choose onDragStart if you want to start the drag or not.

It also validates XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1.

Outro

Please go and have a glance. Add your bookmarks into the vault. Play with it a little. And please do come back and leave some feedback.

Comments