Thursday, September 30, 2004

FlexWiki is an evolved WikiWikiWeb implementation for .NET. It has an extensible internal language, called WikiTalk, that can be used to extend the framework with new behaviors. I'm currently exploring this framework with some nifty ideas... here's a first snapshot: a behavior that renders the graph of the pages (all the nodes are clickable)

 

posted on Thursday, September 30, 2004 1:30:00 PM UTC  #    Comments [7]
Monday, June 06, 2005 5:24:37 PM UTC
Just wanted to give you some props, first of all. I'm constantly in love with (and in awe of) your stuff. The custom software shop I work for has only one employee (myself) if you don't count the owner, so I've been given the leeway to do some things as cleanly as I want, with the tools that I need -- <a title="MbUnit, Generating Unit Testing and Model Based Testing Framework for .NET Framework" href="http://mbunit.tigris.org" target="_blank">MbUnit</a> is rapidly proving invaluable. I have to confess, though, that I often find myself limiting my use of it to primarily NUnit-compatible tests (and in fact often limiting myself to using NUnit) for potential maintainability issues, until I can set up a testing manager/provider abstraction in my projects, similar to the kind of abstractions that are relatively common for managing object persistence providers.
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<br> Just wanted to say that I've really appreciated the great tools that you've put out there, and especially the work you've done with GraphViz -- an amazing library capable of causing painful physical arousal in true lovers of computer science.
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<br> More than that, the work you are doing has often been a source of inspiration to me, particularly a year ago at my first job, where I was a bug finder/fixer (entry-level) on a system that had been built largely by intuition and feel by a brilliant guy who, unfortunately, never really wanted to be a programmer! It was in asp, no OO, no xml/xsl/anything, all code mixed in with the page layout etc (head coder was also a brilliant artist), no css except for coloring text -- and the underlying data structures that this very rich webapp operated on and for were acyclic digraphs that modelled movements of items (living items :P) over time. The head coder had sort of invented depth-first traversal for himself, because he'd needed it to make the reports work. :o It was an amazing experience, but frustrating for a young coder who spent 90% of his time tracking down bugs in baroque SQL string-concatenation code mixed in with html. When I stumbled across GraphViz I was amazed, and that brought me here; keep up the awesome work! I'm glad everyone else is noticing, too.
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<br> I'm not familiar with FlexWiki. But the notion of using NGraphviz as a means of providing more insightful navigation immediately made me think of:
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<br> - The ASP.NET 2.0 SiteMapPath,
<br> - The 'State Machine'-esque modelling of user interfaces that the UIP AppBlock provides.
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<br>It seems like each migh be able to provide source data to the graph in interesting ways (heh, well, I don't know much about FlexWiki).
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<br>Does it use the svg interaction, or a gif with imagemaps? (The second one seems like it could have some value for widespread use if no one has yet conjured up such a control).
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<br>I speak for many when I say we can't wait to see what this will look like by the time you're through with it.
mr_luc
Monday, June 06, 2005 5:24:47 PM UTC
Thanks for this big comment :)
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<br>&gt; often limiting myself to using NUnit for potential maintainability issues
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<br>I totally understand that you keep carefull about using <a title="MbUnit, Generating Unit Testing and Model Based Testing Framework for .NET Framework" href="http://mbunit.tigris.org" target="_blank">MbUnit</a>. It is a rather young and rapidly moving library. In a near future (a few days I hope), you will see a BIG improvement in the way <a title="MbUnit, Generating Unit Testing and Model Based Testing Framework for .NET Framework" href="http://mbunit.tigris.org" target="_blank">MbUnit</a> handles bug/upgrades and so on. I cannot tell you more because it is a surprise but I'll give you some hints: CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild, Wix...
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<br>&gt;I'm not familiar with FlexWiki
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<br>A Wiki is really about creating links between pages, i.e. building a graph. I'm sure you could apply this technique to other web site. You need 2 methods: one that returns a list of pages, one that returns a list of links between those pages, from there, you can quickly have an image poping up :)
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<br>&gt;Does it use the svg interaction, or a gif with imagemaps?
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<br>Currently it uses SVG because of it's simplicity of use. Of course, you cannot expect everyone to have the pluging installed. As you may know, Graphviz supports output to mapped gif files, so modifying this behavior should be rather easy.
Jonathan de Halleux
Monday, June 06, 2005 5:24:47 PM UTC
Can't wait to see this released!
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<br>I've been using FlexWiki for some time now (though I struggle with WikiTalk) and have just started exploring the use of FlexWiki as a Bliki (<a target="_new" href="http://bliki.salamandersoftware.co.uk">http://bliki.salamandersoftware.co.uk</a>).
Derek Lakin
Monday, June 06, 2005 5:24:48 PM UTC
The bliki looks great... I'm tempted
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Jonathan de Halleux
Monday, June 06, 2005 5:24:48 PM UTC
Paul's Imaginary Friend
Monday, June 06, 2005 5:24:49 PM UTC
Test Driven .NET
Monday, June 06, 2005 5:24:49 PM UTC
Test Driven .NET
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