Making a desktop chat client from Sidewinder and KoolIM
KoolIM is a very impressive web application that allows you to chat
with people via any of the popular messaging protocols. The KoolIM
servers do all the work of translating the protocols, which means that
the user interface need only communicate over HTTP to the KoolIM
servers. It's therefore possible to build chat clients with HTML,
which of course means that users do not need to install any special
software and can chat with friends and colleagues from almost
anywhere.
Since KoolIM supports so many protocols it's an extremely strong
candidate to be used as your main chat software, following the trend
set by Google web applications for email, diary and spreadsheets.
Although the applications themselves are incredibly powerful, you
still feel like you are running a web page in a browser--and that's
the problem that Sidewinder aims to solve.
Sidewinder is a framework which makes web applications look like
desktop applications, by providing features such as docking to the
side of the display, auto-hiding, opacity, transparency, and so on.
The latest release of Sidewinder sports an extremely useful feature
which is an event that tells an application when a new window is being
created, and then allows a renderer object to be provided instead of
the usual browser window.
Since the KoolIM web application creates new windows whenever a new
conversation is started, then substituting a renderer window allows us
to make the already professional looking KoolIM feel that bit more
slick; with a few lines of code it's possible to provide KoolIM with a
window that docks to the left side of the screen and automatically
hides when the mouse is moved away, or to alter the position of
successive windows so that they are all visible, or even to create a
semi-transparent window that will always be visible in a corner of
your desktop.
We've provided full details in a skimstone article, along with details
on creating a desktop calendar with Google Calendar. If you want to
give these applications a try you'll need the latest release of the
Sidewinder beta, and it would be worth reading the notes on writing
applications with JavaScript.
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Tags: webapps | programming | web standards | standards | browser |
javascript | Ajax | KoolIM | XML | HTML | XHTML | XHTML 2 | Web2.0 |
XForms | XBL
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posted by Mark Birbeck at 1:31 AM
1 Comments:
Blogger BuddyStream - Samer Bazzi said...
very cool.
October 03, 2006 5:02 AM
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