New Experiment: Room contents display enCore V4

Continuing along on my experimentation with the user interface in enCore v4, it occurred to me that one of the issues I've had is how the room display is static, relative to the text side.  Where this can be an issue is with a busy class all logged in at once.  The text side is flying with all the comings, goings and chatting amonst the class members, while at the same time the room display, with the list of contents and exits, is frozen. Only a look command or click on the look icon will refresh it.

Several times I have entered a room with people chatting and they did not notice me entering because the text message scrolled past, lost in the chatter, and at the same time the list of the rooms contents didn't change either. They were quite surprised when I started talking!

How to get around that?

Here is my latest experiment... AJAX, Asynchronous Javascript and XML. This is the underpinnings of the infamous WEB 2.0 jazz we've been hearing about for years now.  I found a small javascript file called AHAH, Asynchronous HTML and HTTP, which is a simple implementation of AJAX that only deals with html rather than XML.  You can read about it here: http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/ahah

What this javascript file does is allow us to update PARTS of a webpage on demand or automatically without reloading the whole page. For my experiment I had it update the contents display of the room every second.  The javascript calls a verb on the room that sends back the current list of objects in the room.  The code then checks to see if the contents have changed since the last time and if so it updates the list in the display.

Very cool.

I had to change the SPANs with classes to DIVs with ids, which needed a bit of CSS gigerypokery to line up, but that was it.

The javascript file is very small so does not add any delay to the page when first loaded.

A pleasant surprise was the way the code was able to access the verb on the room, it did not need any path info at all, it knew the host it was being called from and simply returned the verb output without complaint. (Not sure why that works frankly)

This tool should have great use for interactive objects, since pieces of the display can change without having to refresh the whole lot.  Think of communication devices, games, viewports, graphics displays etc. According to the notes with the javascript there can be multiple instances of the updaters on the same page.

I will try to put the code into a package for the Barn in a bit.