Live Web/DAP/DWD Final Project Proposal

Andrea and I have been experimenting with updating online chat. Using AJAX among other things, we were able to allow users on one web page send search results to each other by opening a new window on each client’s side containing the results. Users will be able to open links for one another and browse and navigate the web as a group. For the prototype we added the use of Loki to produce location-based search results. If you and your chat partner both have Loki installed on your browser, you should try our prototype.

For the final project, we are going to create a Firefox extension with these principles on top of, to my knowledge, the only existing Jabber Firefox extension SamePlace. It is quite good. Here is a screenshot of how it looks in the browser:

If you are having trouble understanding how this works, imagine that this screenshot is your desktop. When you navigate to a different page, your chat partner automatically goes to that page as well. If you are planning your evening, you can both be on the same page without having to send links back and forth. The location-based search feature is activated right in the chat window by use of a special character. For example, @restaurants would produce search results for restaurants in my area, and #restaurants would produce search results in your area.

When our extension-upon-extension is complete, you and your chat partner will be able to pull up links for each other for group research, entertainment, or basically whatever you want. Of course we’ll keep the Loki feature, so even if you don’t know where your chat partner is, you can still give them search results based on their current location.

The project will be coded pretty much entirely in Javascript. There needs to be a database that will most likely need to contain a chat id or some other identifier that will be used to access the location info.