Multipage Navigation (or what to do with 24")

bart.tenbrinke@movesonrails.com (Bart ten Brinke) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:20:00 +0200

The third movie of our presentation deserves a seperate blog entry: Multipage navigation.

Because we sell our webapplication on a 24" Mac, we have a problem. As you all know a webpage designed for 1024 x 768 does not look nice on 1920 x 1280. There is just too much whitespace on the left and right.

To solve this in Moves, we wrote a javascript library that makes our application function like a book. If you click employees , you'll get a list of employees. Clicking on a single employee will result in that employee being displayed on the right. Just watch the movie and you'll understand it right away:

3. Multi-page Navigation

There are still some major issues with this library. Because all the links on the application are parsed on the fly and rewritten to Ajax links, they break our nice URLs and the back button (NOOOO! WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT USING AJAX FOR NAVIGATION!!!). This is something we have accepted for the time being (as it is a closed web application), but it is something we want to fix desperately. We can get away with this for the time being because you usually only want to go back one page, and with our multi-page navigation, this page is already visible. Also, users find the breadcrumb navigation very intiuative. The upside is that our library degrades gracefully: If you don't own a big screen, the application will fall back to the standard behavior. Isn't that cool?

We will be releasing this javascript library soon on Ruby Forge. Why? Because then the javascript will work out of the box (no Ruby code needs to be changed). You'll be able to get it to work in PHP or Java, but it you'll need to implement some restfullness in your application.

If you have any remarks or questions, please feel free to email Andre or me (Bart).

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Multipage Navigation (or what to do with 24")