Just thought I'd let you all know what I've been experimenting with for a future version of JCE.
JCE will soon include and AJAX library (xajax). What does this mean exactly? Well to quote from Wikipedia :
"Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability."
In the JCE 'Manager' plugins (Image Manager, Media Manager etc), the file and folder list displayed is located within an iframe which is reloaded everytime an action takes place (delete, rename etc.). This is a horrible waste of bandwidth, and takes a while to load if you have a large list of files and folders as these are re-read everytime the page loads. Using xajax, this is only done when the plugin is first loaded, when the refresh button is pressed or when you change to a new directory. The file/folder list for the current directory is treated as a statc list, and operations are only performed on the selected file(s) or folder, updating the static list if the operation was successful.
There are other cool things we can do with this as well.
The Link Favourties feature for the Advanced Link plugin will re-appear, allowing you to quickly create, delete and re-use links.
Image Manager popups will change to allow for extended functionality and also create better popup links. In future, when you create a popup, the popup image's attributes will be stored in the database, and an id assigned, creating a unique link for that popup, something like : index2.php?option=com_jce&task=popup&pid=2. We will then also be able to add things to the popup, like lengthy descriptions of the image, or possibly even create an image slideshow from a number of images.
There are quite a number of possibilities, and at the moment this is all in a pre-alpha testing phase, but as soon as I think its working, and stable, it will be incorporated into JCE.
Cheers
Ryan.