Thoughts on Structured/Unstructured and Shared Information Management
using Wiki and other emerging technologies
Weblications (blog by Adam Rifkin)
Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled: Weblications:
"With web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use.
All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere,
maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing...
Desktop software forces users to become system administrators.
Web-based software forces programmers to. There is less stress in
total, but more for the programmers..."
Unfortunately the state of web-based application development is rather sorry today. It is not as easy as simple native program development - inspite of all the MVC models, devel environments (such as Struts), and so on. There are simply so many mistakes one can make.
And, if ASP is the way to go, then what could enable rather a large scale offering of web-based applications for end users? A simple deployment environment from a big vendor such as yahoo or google. (Let us call them "deployment vendor"). Such an environment would
- Provide a clean mechanism for creating standards-based front-ends but enhanced by rich-client capabilities offered by such vendors.
- Be completely cross platform - since the deployment vendor can take care of variety of browser compatibility issues. And eventually be able to dictate a standard. (For example, we might reject a desktop platform because applications provided by google don't render well on its browser.)
- Be able to create high availability capability due to caching and other technologies - bringing the ASP app to the nearest node.
- Be able to offer a rich language processing and voice capabilities effectively creating better interaction with the applications.
- Be able to support variety of platforms such as mobile devices, PDAs etc.
- Provide offline capabilities.
And perhaps there are many other points. While most of these are usual ASP requirements, the enhancements because the vendor like google or yahoo have abundance of computing power, and can effectively create application development models around their infrastructure, is a different twist to traditional ASP.
And hopefully, these enhancements expressly incorporate principles of The web way.
Standardizing table syntax for wiki systems ...
Online table editing is very valuable tool - especially in enterprise systems. It could allow a lot of use-cases that require use of database to be done in wiki system itself. Simple form-fills for adding new rows (apart from directly getting table edits) helps simple workflows to be created quickly.
Jotspot demonstrates this nicely, but it seems to hide the actual table data - perhaps storing it in a external datastore associated with the topic. But it is nice to store the table information in topic itself. (Bulk editing, no problems in renaming ...)
But unfortunately there is no standardized syntax for table within a wiki topic (of course we don't have any standard as of now). Wikipedia is evolving to be a great centralized resource, so might propel a standard creation process.
In this context, a useful link is discussion on table syntax:
Help:Table - From Meta; discussion about Wikimedia projects. In particular, even using XHTML as table syntax would help a lot: It might allow someone to create a nice table editing tool - with plugin approach to add semantics such as Spreadsheet ...
-Vinod
Brain would like to minimize the efforts ...
Consider some of the threads in completely diverse fields:
- Amit's Thoughts: Thoughts about pricing - wherein the article, while listing choices available in pricing, brings out the point that fine-grain choices such as (per-call or per-view) are more costly when you consider the cost of thinking involved in making right decisions. For the same reason, gmail (where you don't bother to delete the emails) is much better choice than quota-enabled emails because you have to bother about making choices with each email. And when you have too many choices to make, the cost of email increases.
-
Neuro-aesthetics, Perceptual Grammar, Art, and Usability by Suman Kumar, wherein he connects usability to the fact that humans would like to minimize the work by brain (and supported by another study in this area).
And perhaps in many other areas (such as Adam Bosworth's emphasis on simiplicity in user interfaces, APIs etc.) - the same theme repeats. And yet, when we design things, we don't give sufficient importance to the simplicity angle - especially when you consider the cost of thinking involved in using and interacting with systems.
And perhaps the same principle is source of the bad designs in the first place!
Using (X)Wiki for Creating S5 presentations - Demo at Xwiki
Thanks to Ludovic Dubost for creating a demo of presentations authored using XWiki (using S5 CSS approach of Eric Meyer) - Link: XWiki . Demo . S5.
"Google suggest" Feature
What a great feature! What appeals is the simplicity of the idea and the way it was implemented. Browser as a rich-client model is going to new heights, demonstrating some really interesting capabilities.
Implemented by a google engineer Kevin Gibbs - in his 20% "research" time (as is culture in google), the capability simply uses javascript to do remote RPC with server to get a list of suggested keywords as explroed by Adam Stiles in his blog.).
Any suggestions for Javascript-based SDKs for rich-client Apps?
