The state of wiki APIs
Dave Johnson wonders about the Wiki APIs. Being the author of the JSPWiki:WikiRPCInterface, I concur. XML-RPC pretty much is finished for me as an API standard, and I don't think I will be developing the V2 of the standard onwards.
However, I like Atom. I like Atom a lot. Consider this official: JSPWiki will support both the Atom blog and Atom Wiki APIs. I believe that Atom holds the future instead of XML-RPC. It has the advantage of being designed properly (no timezone hassles, no UTF-8 issues, proper built-in authentication), after all.
We should just remember the lessons we learned with that API: the importance of backlinks, the forward link lists, proper search API, authentication (Atom solves all of my issues by using WSSE, yay!), the ability to handle attachments, introspection, versioning support, and metadata. Most of these vary from Wiki to Wiki.
There is also the issue of the varying markup between Wikis, but I don't think that is such a big issue, API-wise. What we should do is to define a generic WikiMarkup, a variant of XHTML preferably, which is never seen by the user. It's just used to transfer data from a WYSIWYG editor to a WikiEngine, which then does the transformation to the local markup. Or something.
|
More info...
Comments?
Back to weblog
|
| "Main_blogentry_160504_2" last changed on 16-May-2004 22:44:04 EEST by JanneJalkanen. |
Comments
Hi Janne. Don't feel you need to invent the wheel here, Atom4J can do most of the work for you. So far it is a one-man-band, but I'd welcome the company if you'd like to help make it better. Atom4J is integrated into Roller if you'd like to see an example of how it works.It looks like I beat the Sandler to the self-promotion punch for once. Sandler is used in Blojsom, but I haven't looked at how tightly coupled the two are (if at all).
That said, Sandler does have two advantages right now: a lighter parsing mechanism and they have implemented the security layer. But the WSSE security is not part of the official spec so I've intentionally left it out of Atom4J.
--LanceLavandowska, 18-May-2004
Actually, I already integrated Sandler into JSPWiki; I like light things. WSSE is also absolutely necessary IMO, so I wanted to use it. :-)
Sandler's documentation sucks, though. Someone needs to write a HOWTO or something...
--JanneJalkanen, 18-May-2004