Extension:Livelets

The idea of this extension is to allow live articles to be transcluded which update automatically on change in a non-polling, fully event-driven way. It will use the parser-functions syntax to make it very similar in usage to normal templates. It's called a livelet since it's very similar in concept to the re-usable areas of options and information in a web page often referred to as portlets, or applets if the content is of a more applicational style. The difference with livelets is that they are able to accept spontaneous incoming requests, not just to responses to their own requests, which means that livelets are able to stay up to date or be communicated with dynamically without any regular polling being necessary.

Livelets is still being developed and tested on the OrganicDesign wiki, see OrganicDesign:Extension:Livelets for more details. It involves a number of programming languages, but is installed in the usual way of unpacking the files into the MediaWiki extensions directory and including livelets.php from the LocalSettings.php file. It consists of four files:


 * livelets.php
 * livelets.pl
 * livelets.js
 * livelets.swf - compiled from livelets.as using the Flashlets extension

Current State & Usage
Currently the livelet only loads once using Ajax after the page content has loaded and is not dynamically kept up to date. It's used in a similar way to transcluding a template as follows: