Drag and Drop across IFRAMEs

This post is probably the first impression of our future direction after our groundbreaking 2007 R1 release. I would like to share some cool features that we will implement for the 2007 R2 milestone. So in this early stage of development, please send us feedbacks and comments that you have in mind.

One great feature in our list is a robust, event-driven drag and drop framework. While there are tons of free drag and drop frameworks such as scriptalous, prototype, yahoo UI toolkit etc — all of them did not have what we want. That leads us to develop our own drag and drop architecture from the ground up.

One of the requirements that we need to have is the ability to perform drag and drop across IFRAMEs. Imagine that you have a WebDesktopManager with two windows using IFRAME content. Then you need the ability to drag a data from the first window to the second window. This is pretty common scenario in Windows application I guess, but this scenario is almost impossible to be done in Web application.

This is a big challenge that we will try to come up in 2007 R2. Our preliminary implementation shows that the drag and drop across IFRAMEs is possible with very robust event-messaging implementation. As an example, take a look at the following screenshot. Notice that the drag object will automatically dragable while the mouse pointer is crossing to the other WebDesktopWindow (which is using IFRAME content mode).

Besides cross IFRAME support, our drag and drop architecture will also be the first that provide Vista-style cursor-effect and tooltip. Notice the “Move to IFrameRight” visual hints in the above screenshot.

More directions and detailed roadmap for 2007 R2 will be published around early next week in Intersoft Developer Network. Ensure you log into Developer Network periodically and stay tuned with our new updates.

Regards,
Jimmy.