Nov 16 2011
Foswiki Camp this weekend in CERN, Geneva
We’ll be meeting in CERN, for our long weekend foswiki code fest and association general assembly.
its not too late to sign up and help guide the future direction of foswiki
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Oct 04 2011
Last few months foswiki
It seems that I’ve been busy with family things, so have forgotten to blog.
Before we left for Zurich in August, I delivered a foswiki that was an amalgam of TWiki, MediaWiki and Sharepoint Wiki topics.
Sharepoint was the most surprising – technically, its got so much potential, but so little support for endusers. It has federated search, data types, and views, but pretty much all of it needs to be written by someone as a compiled component, and installed on the server.
Seems to me there’s an oportunity for someone to build a compatibility layer allowing _users_ to write applications as in TWiki and Foswiki.
After getting settled in, I was persuaded to start work on foswiki store2 for foswiki 2.0 – bringing together all of the learning and performance work from my Database and MongoDB backends – its happening in my github repository at the moment, as its going to take a month or 2 before its passes all the tests.
And last week, I was distracted by Ward Cunningham’s Federated Wiki – we’ll see how I get myself back on foswiki track – all while looking after the 2 girls (just turned 2.5) while we’re in Zurich.
The foswiki General assembly and FoswikiCamp is probably going to be in CERN, on the weekend of November 19 – hope to see everyone there!
Apr 19 2011
fastest foswiki (and TWiki) ever – MongoDB for foswiki milestone 4
I realised today that I’ve not written up a progress post for foswiki on MongoDB for a bit – and so did a few benchmarks again.
The benchmarks given (at http://foswiki.org/Development/MongoDBPlugin ) are for a structured query on a DataForm based web containing 25,000 topics, and are run on a desktop system running a 1.8GHz core2duo with 2G RAM.
When the foswiki on MongoDB project started, this query would take 5.4 seconds to provide the html to the client (pure CGI), now it takes 0.7seconds (with mod_fcgid).
That’s a speed-up of over 7 times.
Many other large web queries, like a WebIndex on a large web couldn’t even complete before, and now run in a usable fashion.
This milestone we’re separating out each web into its own database, and I’ll be adding in the topic revision information to the database too – that way it won’t matter if you have 10,000 webs, or 1,000,000 – the speed should be essentially constant (so long as you have the server resources to match your loads).
If noSQL isn’t suitable, and you would like to see a similar back-end developed using an SQL engine – contact me – WikiRing and fosiki are looking for interested companies with foswiki (and TWiki) scaling issues – without real life testing, examples and stakeholders, its extremely difficult find the many corner cases that our complex engine can allow.
Apr 07 2011
Sharepoint 2007 to foswiki migration project part 1
I’ve spent the last few days working on getting data out of Sharepoint Wiki, and its shocking. If you read the webservices API and believe it, things would be simple. Sadly, its got some pretty major bugs, and some pretty woeful architecture too.
The worst finding is that although Sharepoint lists have a webservice API to get versioned data, its broken – all versions of the MetaInfo return the text of the last revision. So I had to resort to brute force html GET’s and parsing the html to try to get the historical info.
Still, data gathered and saved – next week I’ll start trying to extract the valuable user written text from the masses of shoddy html (like in MS Word to html, every line is surrounded by the same 100 character css styles, setting font to Verdana etc.
Dec 15 2010
Google’s DataWiki experiment
Google Labs has just added a GoogleAppEngine based Java application called – DataWiki.
So far, project information is very minimal, but it looks like one of the features Foswiki (and its parent) have been doing for 10 years…
The timing is excellent, as I’ve been working with others in the Foswiki Community to improve Foswiki’s mashup-ability:
enable easy input/output from a variety of endpoints, e.g. via Twitter, ODK or SMS from a remote location
Right now we’re working on a proper REST API for foswiki data – enabling us to retrieve and save changes to datasets in formats that are convenient to the external endpoints – and to simplify the development to dynamic visualisation and editing tools for complex data.
Perhaps what we’re looking at is a combination of the acquired and shut down JotSpot, and a response to Yahoo Pipes 
Foswiki is an extremely mature (10 years) DataWiki capable enterprise wiki, with significant traction in workplaces around the world, and a strong, motivated developer and user community.
Dec 14 2010
Make your foswiki run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache
google has released mod_pagespeed and I’ve turned it on on home.org.au, and I think there is a noticeable improvement in rendering speed.
brilliant – a simple, effective way to make your wiki load faster!
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