Busy Busy Schedule

A good usable interface is the holy Grail of all good web applications. Sites like Google and Flickr amongst others have excellently designed sites with good use of the latest JS and AJAX technologies. For mere mortals the only option to achieve similar levels of usability is to use the various JS frameworks and toolkits such as Scriptaculous, MooTools or Dojo.

Going one step further it would be useful to make use of tried and tested components built using these frameworks for integration into the site. Examples of these include calendars, drop-down navigation and forms. This way the only task is to integrate the components with the back-end system and customize to meet all the requirements.

Today I was looking for a scheduling component. Basically a calendar but with the ability to have multiple instances for each module on a page and the ability to drag items onto the calendar and resize for various time periods. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that anything even close exists. There are plenty of calendars but not any that would meet these requirements.

I am going to do some more investigation and see if something can be built. There seems to be a number of Flex resources that might be suitable and I will try and get them working. Integrating a Flex application could be much more tricky. It is going to be a long 3 weeks ahead of me.

UPDATE
I investigated all methods and given the simplicity of the requirements it would just take too long to integrate any of the components available. The Flex example (pictured) certainly holds the most hope for this sort of things. Lets hope some developers push forward the development and add in some additional features. Then it might be worth integrating it into some real systems.