I’ve been working at UFRGS building the next generation Web Desktop to help chemical engineers work collaboratively.
During my research, it was a pleasant surprise for me to stumble upon Ext from Jack Slocum, and notably the work done by Todd Murdock concerning the Start Menu.
Another remarkable work is from my friend Massimiliano Mirra called SamePlace, and notably the concept of XML Sync Islands created by Domenico De Felice.
Currently, the concept of XML Sync Islands has been developed to work over XMPP, but the same concept may work over the Web with the help of AJAX. What this means is that all the cool stuff being built by Massimiliano may find their way into the Web.
I’m building the idea of “Shared Session” into the system. From Todd’s menu I’m calling different services. Each service is loaded in a window. A user may save a session for later retrieval or he might share a session with another user. When a user shares a session, this is what happens: he closes a window, his colleague sees the window being closed. His colleague opens a service, he sees the window being opened. And using the concept of XML Sync Islands, the interaction between the users are even richer. In fact, they are the same ones experienced by users using SamePlace.
Of course SamePlace makes everything just more beautiful and responsive since it brings XMPP to the Firefox browser. It would be neat if browsers had native support for XMPP. Perhaps some day the Mozilla Foundation will recognize Massimilano’s work and other browsers will follow.
Just wanted to provide some kudos to my good friend Todd Murdock, and the awesome work that he is doing. Todd you Rock!