I've been doing a lot of work modernizing the ZiMB Comment system so it is more secure and localizable. I managed to quickly allow for UTF-8 support and have been busy rebuilding the inner workings to use the Dojo Toolkit instead of the terrible hand-written AJAX system it had earlier. This should make it much more secure and customizable. I'm looking at packaging all of the text related to the module in files that can be translated and modified easily by the end-user.

Also, there will be support (with ZiMB Manager) of Dojo Widgets in the comment's front-end UI. I used a very modular, programmable backend framework to support the generation of that data and it will be very easy for a moderately skilled developer to completely customize not only the CSS but the entire structure of the interface. As long as certain fields exist in the custom interface, it will work. This should alleviate most of the problems with the rigidity of the previous incarnation.

Anyway, on to the progress with ZiMB Manager. Much of the benefit of the Manager is that it allows the site designer to leverage all of the Dojo and ZiMB/Zend functionality from not only the Component design level but also from the actual articles themselves. You can arbitrarily add javascript and UI elements inside the editor (I'll need to generate a new one that doesn't strip markup but that's a different article) but I realized quickly that there was something glaring missing. I needed a trivially easy way to access backend PHP at the module and article level. It would be pretty useless to grant the user so much javascript level functionality and then hamstring it with no actual data support.

Problem was, how do you deliver the PHP in a modular, generic manner from the front end while allowing the backend administrators enough flexibility to accomplish whatever they need? I set to work this afternoon as soon as I realized there was such a glaring hole in my plan and had fleshed out a concept a few hours later. Since then, I've been hammering at it all night and have gotten it worked out nicely.

Essentially, I've created a backend "Script Manager" that allows the user to write arbitrary PHP script and have it stored in the database. On the front end, the ZiMB Core plugin provides a javascript function that takes a few simple parameters and interfaces with and evaluates the backend scripts and returns a JSON encoded representation of the data to the calling javascript. Of course, it is completely possible (and often desirable) to simply use the interface to persist data or run some other function on the backend AJAX-style. You can see an example of that in how the contact button to the right works. It takes the information you enter into the form, scrubs it and then uses the Joomla! sendMail function to get work to the ZiMB Info box.

So, where does this all lead? I'm not entirely sure yet but I do know that you IBM i users out there are really going to love it. It hasn't been implement but I've developed the concept of how RPG, CL and system commands will be called using an almost identical solution. Instead of a writing your own script, I'll create a 'wizard' interface wherein you enter an RPG program, etc. and its parameters and the interface is generated on its own. From there, you'd only need to reference that script from the front end as you would one of these other scripts and voila! Instant AJAX to the IBM i without any knowledge of how that actually works! Sadly, these tools will be part of the for-charge ZiMB Studio but, of course, you'll still be free to write your own RPG calls in the Script Manager.

As you can see, things are very exciting around here and are really moving forward quickly. A new version of ZiMB Manager will be deployed to this site in the next few days after we do some more testing.