drag and drop workflow kind of interface..how easy to develop?

Question

Hi friends,

How easy it's to come up with a drag and drop web-based interface that'll provide me features to wire objects together, setup configurations nicely in a modal window for each object? I'm looking for links that've any similar kind of interface, or articles on this. also, i'm looking for your technology/language suggestions.

Another way I'm thinking - as a desktop appln + browser dependent addon..

Is it good to create such an user-interface using XUL, which can be deployed as an addon on Firefox/as a stand-alone application in Windows? Are there any other similar things/technologies which can provide a basic framework for us to build on it further?

Why do I need this, finally? ..for building simple Workflows, for defining process flows, that can provide me some auto-generated xml content which I can use for further processing.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm quite interested in this, too.

I've flirted with HTML5's DragDrop implementation - Quirksmode has Bad Things to say about that, so then I thought "Perhaps a JavaScript library can help me" - haven't checked out jquery for this yet, but I have checked out YUI's DragDrop, DragDropManager and DataSource, and its looking hopeful (consistent, reliable).

I tried things like adding an iframe on the fly to any document, to provide this kind of functionality without needing to add dependencies to the page given the iframe - mixed results, but in my case I was trying to cater for x-domain access, which proved difficult.

So I'd say JavaScript could be a winner - if designed poorly it could be difficult to manage resources though, if you want to potentially DragDrop/edit/config any element in a document - so watch out for that.

If you're keen and able, Adobe AIR apps also look promising - but I can't help with any more info on that, other than they're Desktop Apps with great flexibility.

I'ma going to keep an eye on your Question, I look forward to any other Answers/comments!

EDIT: I forgot to mention Flex (aka Flash Builder 4, latest version) is quite easy to create stuff like this, though I've had exposure to Flash for a while. It comes with the standard Adobe caveats; price, libraries, support.