Tools for Improving Online Information

Over at O'Reilly, Andy Oram has an interesting article on improving online documentation, moving it beyond a mere digital rendition of the traditional print media.

He suggests two tools which will, he thinks, improve the way documentation is done in an online world. Ready for them?

• Quizzes: Objectively measure the effectiveness of the documentation by gaining useful feedback.
  
• Bibliographies: Provide cross-referencing tools that can help build "paths" through available documentation. And make it easier for readers to contribute to building such paths.

Of course, it is no surprise that I think the second one is invaluable. I've been known to dabble in that area in the past.

I also just recently became maintainer of the venerable the Quiz module on Drupal.org.

Sinciput UI

So what's up with Sinciput? Actually, I'm stuck. I have been working relentlessly to produce a decent user interface. And I am stuck. I mean, I am stuck.

I have recently fallen in love with jQuery, which I think is the most elegant Javascript API known to man. And it has made possible some amazing web design. Much of the current UI is built with Javascript, now. Like Google Mail and other apps, the vast majority of Sinciput now runs without ever reloading the entire page.

But the interface itself is not feeling right. I wanted to advance it beyond the old UI. However, I just can't see how to do that at the moment. Unfortunately, until that is done... no Beta.

Is that all that's stopping Sinciput at the moment? The short answer is yes. Of course, there are other things that could use some work, but that's all that prevents me from releasing the beta.

Old Sinciput Revision

I (Matt Butcher) released an alpha-quality revision to the original Sinciput 1.0 PHP code base. This new version, 1.5 alpha 1, is transitioning from PHP 4 to PHP 5. The primary change has been from the old DOM XML package to the new DOM package. No major changes have been done to the rest of the project.

Other than making a PHP5 version available (mainly for my own purposes), no new development is happening on the PHP version. The Java version alone is under active development.

Relocating

I've just finished relocating from Chicago to Colorado. It's been a great move, but a little exhausting.

While this has caused a bit of a delay in Sinciput's development, things are picking up again. I've just gotten Eclipse configured for development.

The Sinciput Servlet

I have just added the Sinciput servlet to the SVN repository at Google Code.

This new servlet has not been thoroughly tested (it has been tested a little, though), and it is certainly far from finished, but it is checked in and it runs.

Sinciput will work by loading a number of special classes, mainly command classes and descriptive Enums, which will then be used within the Rhizome command architecture.

I anticipate that once I get going on Sinciput basics, things should progress quickly. But at the outset, the difficult tasks will be coding the commands, and getting the dynamic Enum-based data model working.

Middle-Tier Rhzime Construction

The alpha code from the Rhizome backend is done. But in the first stages of Sinciput development, I realized that a good deal could be abstracted, and it seemed a good fit for Rhizome to add a middle-tier controller model.

This new model will make development of applications as simple as adding some commands (Rhizome will map requests to chains of commands), and adding some Velocity templates. Moderately complex implementations might need to create a few Enumerations. More complex applications can implement custom command classes to handle data processing. But for simple apps, it may be as simple as editing some XML and HTML.

The next stage will be to implement a generic Rhizome servlet (to make web applications easy to develop). Then, we will be off to Sinciput.

Rhizome Status

Rhizome is the new backend that will drive Sinciput (it is a complete replacement of Pilaster, which was a good, but limited, architecture).

In a nutshell, Rhizome is a non-hierarchical storage and retrieval engine that includes full text searching, metadata-based data retrieval, relationship support, and an open extension mechanism.

While Pilaster was limited to a single sort of data storage mechanism (namely, Berkeley DB), Rhizome has no such limitation. Further, while Pilaster required that the repository and the index files be located in the same "place", Rhizome makes no such requirement.

As it stands now, Rhizome has the following items completed already:

• A handful of classes implementing the new Rhizome XML format.
• A core set of managing classes and interfaces.
  
• A file system implementation of the repository.
• A Lucene-based implementation of the search indexing code.

The main task left, now, is to implement the searching interface for Lucene, which will provide a method of performing either semi-structured or completely structured searches of the Rhizome repository.