Yafumato Development Log

Yafumato 0.5

February 4, 2006 on 1:51 am | In Release |

As I said, I just released Yafumato 0.5. It had actually been ready for about a week, but I delayed releasing it because I was studying for the GMAT exam. Now that the test is over (750, woo-hoo!), I can start getting to all the things I had put off.

In my initial post I described the versions leading up to the initial public release, so I’ll just take a second to talk about the 0.4 release. From an interface perspective, the changes were minor; a few dynamic updates were bolted on to the page, but they could only update elements that were already visible. The real effort was the server-side code to support the dynamic updates — to determine what changed and create the XML. The 0.5 release was well into development when I released 0.4, which I tested for about a week. Although the changes in the 0.5 release are much more dramatic, only a few files were changed from the 0.4 release.

So, what’s new in the 0.5 release? Well, although it may not look it, the messaging page was completely redesigned. I implemented a JavaScript object model that is patterned after the server-side architecture. The JSP actually writes very little HTML when generating the messaging page, instead populating the JavaScript object model that dynamically creates the HTML for the pager. The pager is now completely dynamic as a result. Contacts are dynamically shown or hidden based on their status (by default the page uses the AIM convention of a separate group for offline contacts, though this behavior can be changed in the JSP). Also, the actions of sending messages and expanding or collapsing groups now dynamically update the page rather than redirect to a new page. The actions that still redirect are updating status and activating a contact. If a contact is active when the page is loaded, however, that contact can be deactivated and reactivated dynamically. When the update interval is set to a low value (I like to use three seconds at home) the application is very responsive. Once you’ve activated the contacts that you want to chat with, you could chat for hours with only dynamic updates.

The next release will feature DHTML windows — I believe that this is the main feature that other web messengers have that Yafumato lacks. The Dojo toolkit has them. Unfortunately, the DHTML window widgets are undocumented, so I’ll have to do some experimentation.