Our focus now is entirely on creating a web desktop UI. The reason for this is two-fold:

• Persistent high-level user objects, i.e. Rolons, are the perfect back-end for a desktop. And
• A desktop UI is likely the best-possible way of working with these same high-level user objects.

On the server side, every user has a desktop rolon which manages the client desktop. There is also a rolon for every icon and for every window on the desktop. These icon and window rolons each have a link to some other rolon for which they are the providing access to the user. But these links can be transversed in both directions, so when a rolon changes, it knows where to send change notifications.

The client desktop is a single page, /desktop/index.jsp. All communication between the client and the server is via JSON text sent using cometd messages, so the UI is entirely asynchronous, allowing the content of a window to be updated as the backing rolon changes.

(An asynchronous, message-based UI is quite interesting, as messages can easily be routed to other servers. Next year we plan to make the webtop fully distributed, where the icons and windows on a single webtop can provide access to rolons on any number of remote systems.)

Now one of the big advantages that the AgileWiki platform has is that it is fully composable, which means we can replace the cometd messaging with a test framework and run the desktop as a stand-alone program, i.e. without running the Jetty web server. Indeed, we already have a fully functional test framework. It reads JSON messages from a test file, routes them to the targeted UI rolon and then validates the responses against the expected messages included in the test file. This tool has been a huge help in getting things rolling and will allow us to perform extensive regression testing as we move forward.

There still remains a great deal to do. With release 17.4.0 we only have made a good start on a scrollable webtop. Icons can be dragged about, icon names are localized and if you open two different browsers (like Firefox and IE8) the desktop will scroll so that the selected icon is always visible in both browsers. Multiple language support is now included, including right-to-left display for Arabic. And logout is now working. But there is still a long ways to go yet. The icons are only partially implemented. And as for the windows, we have only just started writing the specs.

Commercial developers, please note that the AgileWiki Webtop is licensed under LGPLv3. This means that you will be able to include it in your product--we have taken care not to include any GPL licensed code. (We are using JQuery and JQueryUI, but these are dual licensed and should not present a problem.)

The role of the AgileWiki Community is:

• to help developers understand and use the AgileWiki;
• to further the development of AgileWiki; and
• to build a team that can provide future support.

Meeting Room: AgileWikiDevelopers

• SmtpCodeReview 26 January 2009
• PeerArkProxyCodeReview 27 January 2009
• Relations
  • Relations1 1 February 2009 Intro to Relations
  • Relations2 2 February 2009 Review of - Relations API in Root
  • Relations3 4 February 2009 Review of RelationRoot