Google Wave looks amazing

Here's the full video from the Google Wave presentation at the Google I/O developer conference... It looks really, really promising. Making this baby Open-Source could change the face of the web. It looks a bit like the social, collaborative OS of the future...


I can't wait for IE to support HTML 5 now since until it does we'll have a harsh time making such awesome technology go mainstream.

Who do you have in mind when designing software?

While looking for something not directly related to software development, I stumbled over Joel Spolsky's blog this evening. I've already read most of the articles on his blog an like them a lot.

He wrote 3 especially good articles about "designing for people who have better things to do with their lives":
  1. http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html
  2. http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html
  3. http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000064.html

If you never had the opportunity to read them even though you're involved in software development and/or design, now is the time !!

BONUS ARTICLE: why you should have testers http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000067.html

Building a Bookmarking Application

I've been spending a couple spare hours last week working on building a Bookmarking application proof-of-concept on top of XWiki. XWiki is a second generation wiki (http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/SecondGenerationWiki) and I fully took advantage of this to build my application.

I got the idea from a customer meeting a couple months ago, when a customer from a large company told us he was using our software to share links with his coworkers. Sharing a link was as simple as creating a new wiki page and it worked very well. However, he was concerned about what would happen once the link count would grow: how would his users be able to find relevant links about a specific topic?

After reading about jerome's (@jvelo) brand new livetable component (http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/LiveTable) I thought it would be great to use it in order to display a list of bookmarked items.

I used delicious.com as an inspiration source: each bookmark is kept bare, with a title, an url, notes and tags. Additionally, underlying wiki features remain available: users can comment on and attach files to any given bookmark. Access rights could also be used if needed.

Here's a quick overview of the application:

  1. View a individual bookmark
  2. Add bookmarks and browse them
  3. Edit a bookmark

I'd be glad to get feedback from the community as to whether this application is worth the additional effort to turn it into a full-fledged XWiki application. Anyone interested in using it for real?

My bookmarking application isn't yet available for download (though I plan to make it available for testing on incubator.myxwiki.org pretty soon) since I discovered a couple bugs in the livetable macro while building it (the macro is really really new) and they need to be fixed before the application can be distributed and installed easily. I also plan on writing a tutorial showing how easy it is to build upon and extend XWiki through applications. Stay tuned ;-)

Dirk Riehle on the commercial Open Source business model

Dirk Riehle, one of the organizers of WIKISYM ( http://www.wikisym.org/ ) and a researcher for SAP has a great paper on how companies create, distribute and make money out of Open-Source software. It describes XWiki's model fairly exactly, apart from the fact that since we chose to use only the LGPL license for our product we won't be pushing for a double-licensing model anytime soon.

You can find out the full paper at: http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2009/the-commercial-open-source-business-model/ . It's well worth a read !!

A Semantic Wiki?

It looks like "Semantic Web" is well on its way to become Web 3.0 most serious contender. But what is it all about?

To make a long story short, semantic web is a revolution currently going through its early stages. An example will make it easier to grasp: imagine you're looking into Wikipedia, willing to search only for XVIIth century French Poets. If nobody took the time to write a list of them, you're in for a long and strenuous time searching through heavy loadsof abstruse web pages.

This is where semantics get in. Imagine that, every time one adds a Poet name, he could "label" it with such informations as his birth and death dates, his nationality and the fact that he is a Poet. Or, to put it another way: that on the Poet's Wikipedia page the Poet's birth date was labelled as such and his death date, nationality and status as well. Now you could launch a search saying "I want to search Poets, and their nationality attribute has to be French, and either their birth or death year date must start by 17"

Instead of strict categories, you now have a loose yet effective way to enrich information all around the place in your wiki. Combine this with the power of people freely allowed to add the bits of information they know about, and you end up with a naturally organized body of knowledge - yet nobody had to decide how to organize it beforehand.

This is what Semantic Web is all about, and I must admit it sounds pretty exciting to me.

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC