Well that in itself is pretty useful feedback. Actually I should probably make more clear what exactly I have there. I appreciate it!

“I can’t see any way for me to judge what YAJAF even does other than the vague description of features mention in the FAQ. Personally, I’m looking for something open source with a nice licence.”

Again very useful feedback… maybe I’ll alter the site some more. This whole framework thing isn’t my primary project so I was trying to see if people were at all interested in it. I’m not actually looking to keep it closed source (since it’s all javascript libraries it’s pretty much impossible anyway), I’m looking to see if people would pay for the developer tool. I’ve already started it, but what I envision is a web IDE to generate code with full access to Docs and API. I’m thinking of making it a subscription ($5-$10/month) or advertising based model. The actual code and applications generated would be free/open source.

“Your screenshots give me the impression that YAJAF is more of an interface between the local system and the browser (correct me if I’m wrong).”

Hmmm I guess I need to fix that. There is no interaction between the local machine and the browser (well other than the browser). I assume you mean local as in the PC. The filesystem I was browsing was that of a remote web server.

If you instead mean, ‘local’ to that particular web server, then there are some technical hurdles before you can do truly cross domain applications. I’ve got the seeds of it in a dynamic application/code loader but it’s not fully working yet.

The actual application I’m writing has nothing really to do with the screenshots. You’re correct, the file browser application is just showing a unix filesystem, but that’s because it was a simple little app just to show off the windowing toolkit. It’s basically just a little apache mod_perl module to send me XML representations of the filesystem. The whole sample application took me about 3 hours to write (with debugging!) using the toolkit.

The real power of the whole thing is that it lets you write GUI’s for web applications using standard OO techniques. I don’t know if you’ve played with the prototype/rico/dojo means of programming (with it’s ‘magic functions’) but it can be a little strange and frustrating at times.

Again thanks for the feedback!

-MPK

Although it sounds like you’re not that interested, here’s a little screencast of that same unix filebrowser app.

Your screenshots give me the impression that YAJAF is more of an interface between the local system and the browser (correct me if I’m wrong). My idea of a web-based desktop is more focused on the interaction between different web applications via SOAP/XMLRPC/RSS and organizing those interactions and webapps in a way that smooths out my daily user experience.

You provide a screenshot of a typical *nix filesystem. The filesytem I envision only needs to be those files that I’m interested in storing, not the entire backend server filesystem. I might want to edit the site source via the web so that might be included but certainly I don’t need /proc and crap like that. Another thing I want is the filesystem to be taggable. This might make navigating the filesystem a little different than the usual hierarchial tree approach we’re accustomed to. I have no solid implementation ideas on this so far though.

The javascript windowing is a critical part of the web desktop but having something open and free is what this project is about. I won’t be interested in a closed project. There are already companies working on what I’m talking about but they want to control the source and ultimately my data so they can charge me what they will. I want ultimate control of my own information which means I need it to be open and free. I want to be able to take my entire web desktop, files and all, and move to a new web host if I so choose.

I’ve tried to simplify the creation of ajax style applications with my YAJAF! javascript library/Ajax framework. I think I’ve come up with a way to build on the tacit knowledge of GUI programmers, creating an extremely flexible library/framework, and making it all very ‘natural’ to use for programmers of traditional object oriented languages. I haven’t released it yet, and I’m trying to see if there’s any interest in doing so. I’m looking for comments to try and gauge interest.

All comments are welcome, including “you fool, what the heck are you thinking, there’s X million js libraries out there already!”.