Ajax Design Patterns

Chapter 15. Page Architecture

THE “PAGE ARCHITECTURE” PATTERNS ARE A VARIETY OF INTERACTION STYLES AND STRATEGIES FOR structuring content. In many cases, it is the possibility of web remoting that makes these patterns worth using.

Drag-And-Drop has been a fixture on the desktop for a couple of decades but is only now gaining currency in the browser. One situation in which it’s used is with the Sprite pattern. A Sprite is a little icon that lives “in front of” the main document and can move around freely like a character in a video game. The next pattern, Popup, uses the same overlay technique, but for larger, dialog-style content.

Malleable Content is content that appears to be read-only but becomes editable upon a gesture such as a mouse rollover, a fairly new idiom because it relies on web remoting. Similarly, a Microlink is a link that uses remoting to conjure up content for insertion in the page.

A Portlet is a small component of the page that acts like a mini-application, capable of conducting a conversation with the server independent of the main page flow. A Status Area provides information about current and past activity and is relevant to Page Architecture because it helps reduce the space occupied by each individual element. Update Control allows the user to control information flow on the page. The final pattern, Virtual Workspace, lets the user explore a large server-side structure, yet it makes the remoting transparent, creating the illusion that everything’s happening ...