Re: Desktop search tool using lucene

[Paul A Houle <ph18 cornell edu>]

Joe Desbonnet wrote:

> Traditionally web based UIs were limited, but nowadays most of the
> limitations have been removed thanks to CSS styling and 'AJAX'
> techniques (example: gmail).
>  
   Yeah,  until you actually try it.

   When I do javascript projects I spend about 30% of the time getting 
the app working and then the other 70% worrying about browser 
compatibility and workarounds for funkiness in the browser.  For 
instance,  if you're doing a drag-and-drop interface in Mozilla,  you 
don't get notification when the cursor leaves the browser window,  and 
mouse move events don't tell you if the buttons are down,  so you can't 
really 'do the right thing' in these cases.  The best thing I've figured 
is to extrapolate the motion of the mouse,  and assume that the mouse 
went out of the window if it was heading for the edge of the window and 
we don't see any mouse events after a time delay.

   Like GUI applications,  it's easy to make an AJAX application work 
80% of the time (like the GUI crapplets that come with Fedora) but 
getting right behavior the rest of the time takes a big investment of 
time and energy,  something most open source authors,  never mind 
commercial entities,  aren't willing to do.