In this post, I’ll describe what I did for the last of these ideas: writing a client app for the wiki that comes with IBM’s Lotus Connections. <\/p>\n
The idea<\/strong><\/p>\n In the same way that I am writing this post in an offline blogging client, I wanted the same for using wikis: read and make changes to a wiki while offline, with changes uploaded to the online wiki the next time you are online.<\/p>\n This wasn’t a new idea. In fact, I tried it at IBM HackDay 4 back in 2007<\/a> but the wiki we used at work at the time had no API access for retrieving or updating wiki pages. So I sort of gave up and forgot about the idea.<\/p>\n But now I use Lotus Connections wikis<\/a> at work. And Lotus Connections does have an API<\/a> – an AtomPub API that gives you feeds to know when pages are changed, and a way to publish changes. <\/p>\n So I decided to revisit the idea.<\/p>\n The “finished” (ish) hack<\/strong><\/p>\n It’s still very rough around the edges (this was a HackDay – I wrote the client code in under a day!) but it already shows the basic idea.<\/p>\n The top left view shows the list of your wikis. <\/p>\n Clicking on this fills the list below – a list of pages in the selected wiki. Clicking on a page in that list opens the contents of the page in the main view on the right. <\/p>\n There are a few design decisions perhaps worth mentioning…<\/p>\n Java – for cross-platform<\/strong><\/p>\n I thought it’d be good to write something that (might?) run on Windows, Linux or Mac, so I went with Java. (I did consider basing the hack on my .NET personal wiki app<\/a>, but I wanted to avoid a Windows-only solution.)<\/p>\n SQLite – for storing pages offline<\/strong><\/p>\n I did consider using Derby<\/a>, as this seems to be Sun’s preferred embeddable database of choice<\/a> for Java apps. But in the end, I still went with SQLite because I’ve used it before and quite like it. <\/p>\n Yeah… should probably have thought of a more technical rationale. But for the purposes of a Hack Day, I didn’t really care – just wanted something I could cache text in!<\/p>\n MQTT – for being useful while online<\/strong><\/p>\n At a starting point, I could make something which just sucks in a copy of a wiki, so you can read and edit it while you’re offline.<\/p>\n But I was feeling adventurous on Friday. I wanted more than that. I wanted the client to still be useful while you are online, too.<\/p>\n The main improvement is that the app is (or should be!) quicker to open pages than the web-based version. <\/p>\n But to make it a compelling online client, it needed to be able to keep up-to-date. <\/p>\n If someone else creates a page in a wiki while you are online, it should appear in your list of pages automatically. If a page is edited online, the client app should receive this in the background and download the updated page. <\/p>\n So if you use the client app while online, it should just show you up-to-date (ish?) pages as if you were using the web interface.<\/p>\n![\"Offline](\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2522\/3998628297_0a23f76e7f_o.png\")
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