Tuesday, April 4th, 2006
ALE: Ajax Linking and Embedding
Category: Articles
, Editorial, Examples
Ross Dargahi of Zimbra has chimed in with a a pint of ALE in which he discussed how Ajax can get into the linking and embedding business:
AJAX Linking and Embedding (ALE) provides the ability to embed rich content into an editable document and to then interact with and edit that content in much the same way as it is done with traditional office suites and applications in a desktop environment. A key difference is that instead of embedding objects that are backed by installed desktop applications (e.g. a spreadsheet or drawing application), within the ALE world the embedded objects are AJAX components that are embedded into an editable HTML document. These components adhere to a set of design patterns specified by the ALE specification. So, for example, if a user is editing some content such as a personal note or an email message, then she would be able to directly embed an AJAX spreadsheet into the note or email body and interact with the spreadsheet while remaining in the editing context of the note or email message. As long as the spreadsheet component adheres to the ALE specification it could be fetched across the network, instantiated, and used regardless of the user’s location.
The meat is in design vs. read mode:
Ross created a draft ALE specification and made a demo available
Are you ready for a drink?
Funny thing is - it’s called AJAX Linking and Embidding, but really, it uses a web browsers design mode and IFrames. Not really the standard XmlHttpRequest you think of when you think of “Ajax”.
And the IFrame isn’t really all that asynchronous.
Interesting Finds
Hello, my name is Jorge Rubiano, of Colombia, I want to congratulate them by the Zimbra Beta, is something very good, with Ajax estan obtaining many things, that a time ago were impossible.
It wanted to know if they have tutorials of Ajax, that can facilitate to me, since at this moment I am learning. Again congratulations….
[...] A cool concept based on Microsoft OLE, transported to AJAX world, except that it is called ALE. Here is the draft spec. [...]