How to create similar behavior as Gmails Contact manager

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How to create similar behavior as Gmails Contact manager

Hi all,

I would like to create something similar as Gmail's contact manager.

I'm not very experienced with Javascript, I understand the basic concepts of AJAX and know my way around jQuery. But that is as far as it goes.

Book/blog recommendations are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey I don't know the exact solution to your question, but there are some open source applications available.You can have some idea after you go through the source.

Gontact GTK+ contact manager

As you mentioned Ajax take a look at this PHP AJAX File Manager (PAFM)

And let me know if it was any help.

Ravi 2009-09-16 15:17:49

http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1254667928/ref=sr_nr_i_0?ie=UTF8&rs=&keywords=javascript&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Ajavascript%2Ci%3Astripbooks

Edit: The above link is not intended to be tongue-in-cheek, or violate stackoverflow purpose, etc. It is there because the poster asked for book recommendations, and amazon has the best book recommendations of any site I know. If someone knows of a place with better book recommendations, please share.

Will Peavy 2009-10-04 14:55:18

-1. I suppose your answer is a bit tongue-in-cheek but I doubt the questioner has problems using amazon's search. Answers like this are contrary to Stack Overflow's purpose.

brianpeiris 2009-10-06 14:33:02

The author stated, "Book/blog recommendations are greatly appreciated." I'm not clear on how linking to a list of on-topic book recommendations is "contrary to Stack Overflow's purpose."

Will Peavy 2009-10-08 14:28:36

Linking to an Amazon search results page of the keyword "javascript" is equivalent to telling the user to "just Google it" and *that* is contrary to Stack Overflow's purpose. Did you honestly expect your link to add any knowledge to the discussion?

brianpeiris 2009-10-08 14:42:41

This doesn't really contribute at all to the discussion. Like the FAQ reads, " Be nice.Treat others with the same respect you'd want them to treat you. We're all here to learn together. Be tolerant of others who may not know everything you know. Bring your sense of humor."

S Pangborn 2009-10-08 14:52:09

@brianpeiris - re: "Did you honestly expect your link to add any knowledge to the discussion?" Yes, I believe a link to a site with a list of book recommendations adds knowledge to a post where the author wrote, "Book/blog recommendations are greatly appreciated."@S Pangborn - I agree with the FAQ. If people followed that philosophy, then they would be more tolerant (and less critical) of my response.

Will Peavy 2009-10-08 18:07:02

I think the issue here is that a site like this is designed to use *humans* to help answer questions. A link to search results isn't very helpful. If you had listed books that you read, and you offered a few thoughts on them (eg, 'I liked this book because XXX, but it lacked in area YYY'), than that would be much more helpful. Anyone can type a query into a search engine, but search engines are notoriously bad at telling you if a thing is actually *good*

pkaeding 2009-10-12 18:06:36

If you can use a Java backend or if you don't mind deploying to Google App Engine, you might want to take a look at Google Web Toolkit. They have excellent tutorials and example applications, including a Mail app that you might be able to modify to suit your needs.

If you'd rather not use GWT, you can use any of the several JavaScript UI Libraries out there along with any backend; YUI, Ext, jQuery UI, MochaUI, to name a few. You could also roll your own UI using the underlying cross-browser libraries (YUI, Ext JS, jQuery, MooTools, etc.) or even just plain old JavaScript/HTML/CSS/DOM.

It all depends on your requirements, how much control you want over your code, look-and-feel, behaviour and what your preference is.

Ideally, you'll want to brush up on JavaScript fundamentals and Object Oriented JavaScript as well as HTML/CSS and your server-side language, so that you can build an application with structured, clean and maintainable code. Books on the topic are easy to find.
Realistically, just find a tutorial in the development stack of your choice and continue from there.
It would be best to try and strike a balance of the two.

brianpeiris 2009-10-06 15:35:07

I may add that other options for powerful UI libraries are Sproutcore (http://sproutcore.com/) and Cappucino (http://cappuccino.org/). These will allow you to completely abstract your application from traditional web technologies (HTML/ CSS/DOM).

jd 2009-10-13 21:12:48

Hi Jozef,

I'm actually designing something similar to the Gmail contacts manager. I am using ExtJs with Alfresco as my repository. I've only been working with extjs and javascript for about 3 months though (as of this writing), but I must say using a javascript library like extjs has helped me get acquainted with javascript much easier (Great community and tons of examples to help me online). I'm sure you can do something similar with jquery.

I don't have any book recommendations, but I definitely would recommend browsing through StackOverflow and the forums of the library you are going to use. Chances are, people have implemented something similar or have plugins (for extjs in my case) that will help you get to your goal much faster (and most likely much easier).

Good luck, and happy coding!

Snowright 2009-11-02 19:57:47

I have created similar project in 2007 end. It is Rails(Ruby) project here is the source code.

It uses Ruby, Rails, JQuery

http://github.com/insightmethods/address-ref

Just realized license file is not added ( But sure we make it open source )

nexneo 2009-11-04 15:16:46

ansaurus

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