TreeWorks Blog

The title of the article is not mine, nor the idea. An idea that, between you and me, is absolutely brilliant. The initiator of the subject is Ray Ozzie and the original post is available on the current Microsoft Chief Software Architecture’s blog, I mean here.

What is all about… Well, in general it is about “give power to the people”.

Starting from the idea that the future of the Internet consists in the interconnection of the services, of the processes and, in general, of the information between websites and that currently this process is available only to the field specialists (developers, programmers and so on, who succeed this by designing those applications), Ray Ozzie suggests a way through which regular users can easily exchange the information on their own websites, by importing/copying the desired information directly from other websites.

The solution that was found is inspired by the technology that stays at the foundation of the interconnection of desktop applications: the “clipboard”. Ray Ozzie suggests “Live Clipboard“ - a technology based on JavaScript, Ajax and XML structures, which allows the implementing sites to facilitate copying certain informational structures between them. Why informational structures? Because, if it is intended only the copying of a simple text, this is possible by using the well-known low-end (of the desktop) clipboard variant: text selection, then copy (ctrl+c) and then paste (ctrl+v) to the desired destination of the original text. But considering that there are already predefined data structures such as events, contacts, profiles etc. it would be interesting for the user to copy the entire informational structure, not only excerpts that need to be manually integrated at the target location. And how could he obtain that? Well, nice and easy, with the same clipboard model (Select/Cut/Copy/Paste), just that the initial selection isn’t performed by manually selecting text anymore, but through the icon specially created for LiveClipboard (specially meaning for the conception/design, to show to the user that the application is LiveClipboard Enabled and not because it would have had specially attributes toward a normal gif ) where user clicks and selects the intended action (copy, cut or paste).

Behind interface, the programming part makes everything and when clicking the mentioned icon the proper structure it is visually marked, and after that, at the selection of a (let’s say) copying action, the xml structure that defines the informational object in question it is serialized by JavaScript and then it is kept in the personal computer clipboard. At the “paste” action on the icon of a container where we want to save the informational object from the clipboard, the de-serialization and the importing or the saving (if this is the intention) in the database using Ajax, it is made also from JavaScript. I know! at the first sight it doesn’t seems something extraordinary but that’s because you don’t have the entire picture :). But you can have it by following the 100% functional example that it can be found here.

And the most astonishing thing is the fact that the above-mentioned application also works between two different browsers (meaning that I can copy the structure of a contact in Internet Explorer and paste it in Firefox). And this practically means a small opened door through which, in the near future, I will be able to copy the same structure from a desktop application (such as Microsoft Outlook) and paste it in a website (and vice-versa).

Of course, so far, LiveClipboard is still at the concept stage and many things (including the standards of the informational structure types) need to be developed and especially to be accepted so that this new technology could be used on a large scale. But the perspective is extremely encouraging and you can be sure that in the future we’ll hear again about LiveClipboard.

“Give power to the people!”