Subsonic Forum

As a web developer, frames are really frustrating. I can understand why they are used though since it's much easier to implement. I love subsonic and I'd love to see it get better. The web ui would be much more fun if it used ajax to update the page rather than having to refresh whenever you clicked a new folder or search or saving things to playlists, etc. Understandably, this is a rather large request. I've downloaded the source code, so if I get the time I'll see if I can help out with this

Flash would be even better.

Yeah, what can I say. If I were to start developing Subsonic now, I would probably select a completely different technology...

I would love to see Subsonic take the next step and start using AJAX

Such a change would probably require a SIGNIFICANT recoding effort on sindre's part.

http://yaass-project.sourceforge.net/

That one uses a Flash/FLEX interface, but it's clunky, buggy as hell and deep in alpha.

Subsonic still wins hands down for capability. Would a more modern face help subsonic? Yes.

Would it make much a difference? Not really, when it comes down to it. SS works as it is and it's stable.

My suggestion wasn't merely for aesthetic reasons. Using AJAX, especially with JSON, would drastically increase the speed and responsiveness of the interface. It may require a lot of extra coding effort, but it is almost entirely "view"-related code, so no stability on the backend would have to be sacrificed. When I get the chance, I'm going to look through the code to see how difficult it'd be.

Just for the record - some parts of Subsonic is already using AJAX:

o The playlist
o The tag editor
o The "Now playing" sidebar
o The lyrics popup
o The cover-art lookup

One of the nice benefits of using frames is that you can browse while listening to music. If you could somehow use ajax for the navigation to prevent reloading the web player during browsing/selecting different albums/songs that would be extremely impressive, but as it stands the frames work wonderfully, and in all honesty, for such a huge amount of work there would need to be some sort of return. For private use, there is no real advantage to ditching the frames, as they are compatible with every popular browser out there.

Adding a bit more ajax to smooth the browsing experience could be beneficial in theory...

All things considered I think the interface works great!

I have no clue what you have about the frames...sure it isnt used anymore today...but in subsonic it fits perfect and for all actual browsers they are pretty ok too....

edit:

lol didnt read zeekays post, I totally agree

As a web developer, was just going to point out Ajaxify for jQuery to you Sindre:

http://maxblog.me/ajaxify/

Makes adding ajax so easy it hurts.

first is would congrat you on that nice app... im right now in the process migrating from jinzora (since there isn't much further development and subsonic is faster with a big filebase!).

only thing that is naggin me is that index list on the left side, thank god its not reloaded on every click ... but with more than 2500 artits, the list takes a while to populate. i would hope that with ajax this could be a little more optimized. or are there any other speed tweaks i can try? so +1 for ajax

In terms of playing, it is possible to keep the player going while browsing (see thesixtyone.com)

I think this would be a great improvement to the app. I am very impressed so far. You might also want to work with ubuntu maintainers to get this added to the repo!

mason wrote:only thing that is naggin me is that index list on the left side, thank god its not reloaded on every click ... but with more than 2500 artits, the list takes a while to populate. i would hope that with ajax this could be a little more optimized. or are there any other speed tweaks i can try? so +1 for ajax

This post might be of interest to you: http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1558