Dot Matrix

I’ve experimented with a lot of window managers for linux, from the ancient fvwm through the *boxes to the magnificent e17 (I ended up sticking with Metacity on Gnome but that’s another story).

With the explosion of all those ajax-shmajax applications and enhanced user interfaces, I started looking for a window manager for javascript, and I couldn’t find any. The closest I found was jpwm which is a javascript/php window manager. Not quite what I was looking for.

So, I decided to make my own.

The requirements I had:

• 100% pure javascript. No Server side elements
• Be a lightweight window manager and nothing else.
• The ability to take existing DIVs and wrap windows around them, in a similar fashion to a window manager wraping windows around applications. No code changes should be neccessary as long as the data to window is within a div.
• Provide the basic window interfaces (resize, maximise, move, minimize and shade).
• Be customizable
• Display dependant on CSS.
• Cross browser compatibility
• Easy and painless to integrate into existing system
• Persistency across sessions (via cookies)

I’ll keep a log of the development, for my own sake more than anything.
Obviously this system is destined for commercial projects and will might debut on my company’s flagship application www.freecrm.com, but I’ve decided this would also be my little (well overdue) contribution to the open source movement.

JWM demo (warning: work in progress)