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Introducing Monkeygrease: The Server-Side Greasemonkey

For those who follow this blog, I’m sorry for the sparce activity. I’ve been working on something big… and now I feel like it’s ready to unleash… so here it is…

Monkeygrease Monkeygrease is a very simple servlet filter that will allow a web developer to inject JavaScript, CSS or other elements within a web page. This concept was inspired by the popular Greasemonkey extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Greasemonkey empowers a user to alter and enhance any web page by allowing them to execute user scripts (JavaScript) on any page.

Monkeygrease serves the same purpose as Greasemonkey, however, instead of being a client-side solution, Monkeygrease is a server-side solution. This allows all your users to benefit from enhancements you deploy to your site through Monkeygrease. You might be wondering, “why not enhance the underlying web page or web application?” Consider all of the packaged web applications you have deployed. Many of these web applications are not that easy to enhance. Some web applications are just not conducive to being customized. Also, some of these web applications are “black-boxed” or closed source products that just can’t be customized. Other products are just too complicated and require expert knowledge to carry out interface based customizations.

With Monkeygrease, you can forego customizations to the underlying web application. Instead, you can rely on the power of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets as a means to customizing a web application’s interface. A few examples of interface enhancements may include:

* Changing the look and feel of a web application
* Adding DHTML/AJAX features/effects on your site
* Adding WYSIWYG editing to any textarea field on your site
* Enhance pages by contextually adding content from external providers
* Fix usability issues on any page

For more details, visit the Monkeygrease website.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2005 at 3:26 PM PST and is tagged with , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Introducing Monkeygrease: The Server-Side Greasemonkey”

  1. Dave Sohigian Says:
    November 7th, 2005 at 9:54 PM PST

    Wow! Awesome stuff, Rich. I am not sure if people will fully comprehend the value that a simple extension like this provides. For any people that deal with enterprise applications that are delivered through a browser (like PeopleSoft) this will be a huge add on. This will be true particularly for companies that have multiple enterprise applications - it is often difficult to change the UI because it may require an upgrade that has many moving parts. By adding the flexibility of DHTML to ANY page you want you get tremendous flexibility with low impact. Kudos!

  2. Techlogger » Blog Archive » Monkeygrease: The Server-Side Greasemonkey Says:
    November 14th, 2005 at 4:28 PM PST

    [...] rease: The Server-Side Greasemonkey Rich Manalang from manalag.com has released Monkeygrease, a servlet filter inspired by the pop [...]

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