judacoor Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 Hello everybodyI have windows live mail now and I've also been a little into php and javascript, and after I got a look into the new hotmail interfase I was quite amazed with its user-friendly new capabilities.So I was wondering if anybody could tell how the make that work.I mean, there is one panel at the left of the screen where you can select either mail, contacts, calendar, etc; another panel where you can preview the mail messages, all of your contacts, etc.; and a 3rd panel at the right side, where you get to see the mail message itself, or the entire info of a selected contact, etc.So are these like frames, that keep refreshing after each click, or do they manipulate the info on the screen with javascript...or....how??OH! Another thing....I'm building a website (or trying to) based on php and mySql, and its structure is similar to e-mails, I mean, every user has an account, every account has many e-mails, and contacts, and....well you know the stuff...But I just wanted to check if you guys think it's functional enough to have just one database that stores ALL the messages, contacts, user, etc.; and they are just filtered to each user depending on the user_id obtained by thier login name.In other words, I would have everything on the same database, and for example when a user logs in, the system now knows his user_id within the DB and every time the user requests messages or contacts, or anything, the DB filters just HIS stuff according to his id.Thank you!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justsomeguy Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 I've never used Hotmail but I would assume they are using AJAX to update the different parts of the page. You can always check the code on the page and see what they're doing. There's nothing wrong with using 1 database for everything like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vchris Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 Did you mean using 1 table for everything? If so I'd recommend not to. Everytime you query for something it'll have to check your complete table. You should have 1 table for the user info (user id, user name, password, account creation date...) another one for the emails/PM (user id matching user id, message id, message content, title, date, from, to, ...) another for user contacts (user id, contact id, first name, last name, address, phone...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aspnetguy Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 Windows live mail now looks and functions much like outlook (And Yahoo!'s new mail system) It uses AJAX extensively to make it very interactive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamess Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 Windows live mail now looks and functions much like outlook (And Yahoo!'s new mail system) It uses AJAX extensively to make it very interactivea php/sql based email system wouldnt offer anything near the functionality that proffessional companies can offer via AJAX; hence why they use AJAX and other stuff on top of php/sql.. It works fine for PM (personal message) type systems, but with emails stuff gets really tricky.. I wouldnt recommend you try it.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justsomeguy Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 a php/sql based email system wouldnt offer anything near the functionality that proffessional companies can offer via AJAXThat's not true. PHP/MySQL and AJAX are not mutually exclusive, you use both of them. But I doubt the Microsoft site is using PHP, I'm thinking they probably decided to use ASP.NET instead. With enough time and resources you could duplicate the hotmail site using PHP as the middleware between the interface and the database. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aspnetguy Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 It would be much harder than coding a system with straight php/mysql once you understand how ajax works.If you are going to try this and use ajax, once you understand and have learned ajax, get a good ajax library. this will let you write each ajax request in 1 or 2 lines instead of dozens of lines. jQuery and Mootools have great Ajax libraries or I have one I wrote if you aren't interested in installing a whole library. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
judacoor Posted June 29, 2007 Author Share Posted June 29, 2007 Yeah! thanks!Well it's not exactly a mail platform I'm trying to build, but it is quite alike. And I handled the tables like vChris said, I actually use about 25 tables. Thanks a lot!So AJAX is like the next best thing right now? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aspnetguy Posted June 29, 2007 Share Posted June 29, 2007 AJAX is a way of communicating with the server without refreshing the page. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
judacoor Posted June 30, 2007 Author Share Posted June 30, 2007 And is there any recomended app for AJAX? e.g. Dreamweaver.For example, if you're going to program something in JAVA I'd say you could use Eclipse 3.2.(Like for not having to work in windows Notepad) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justsomeguy Posted June 30, 2007 Share Posted June 30, 2007 You're talking about an IDE. IDEs for AJAX are still in their infancy, you might be able to find one though.http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&...-8&oe=utf-8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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