WikiWiki Warfare In The Enterprise Leading To Situational Software?
WikiWiki Warfare In The Enterprise Leading To Situational Software?
“With the launch of Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer’s (two of the Excite founders) new startup, JotSpot ["the Application Wiki"], most of the attention is being paid to how it competes with SocialText, the original hosted enterprise wiki company. However, Business Week’s coverage is a little more interesting. It’s probably due to how JotSpot is trying to position themselves, but Business Week suggests that, rather than just being something of an open scratch pad, JotSpot lets people build their own software programs. This may seem silly at first. Indeed, it’s clearly overstating the power of wikis right now, though it does show how JotSpot is positioning themselves against SocialText by clearly promoting add-on wiki components that look familiar to typical intranet/enterprise software users. However, the whole idea has me wondering if the wiki concept really could be the platform for situational software. Situational software is Clay Shirky’s way of describing a new breed of quick-and-dirty software designed to solve a particular task for a small group of people, often built by non-programmers. We’ve already written about efforts by Charles Simonyi to create a platform for designing simple to use programming environments for non-programmers trying to solve specific tasks — but perhaps the wiki is one step ahead of this. The problem, though, is that the wiki, by itself, has limited programmability. You can enter text and make links, but that’s not quite the same as building an actual application. While both SocialText and JotSpot appear to offer additional components that they’ve built, the next stage may be for them to start promoting easy integration with additional outside apps and components developed by others. If you start thinking of the wiki as less an open whiteboard for text, and more an open workbench for integrating web services-based applications however you’d like, things start to get much more interesting. ”
[via Techdirt, 02004-10-05]
JotSpot: Application Wiki
Joe Kraus, one of the co-founders of Excite, has long been rumored to be working on a new wiki tool. Today at the Web 2.0 conference Joe finally unveiled JotSpot, a new type of wiki that they are calling an “Application Wiki”. Jot Spot appears to be no…
Yes.. I believe the wiki can be the basis for situational software.. It just needs a lot of work.. I have this vision for my open source project XWiki (http://www.xwiki.org) which doesn’t have “limited programmability” since it is adding Velocity and Groovy as programming languages inside the page..
See some examples for yourself:
- Presentation of child pages like in a blog: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Dev/ChildAsBlogPosts
- SQL Queries:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Dev/GroovySQLBugzilla
- A regular expression tester:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Dev/GroovyRegExTester
- Solution to the google challenge:
http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Dev/GroovyGoogleChallenge
This added to the database and form engine of XWiki you can create complete applications.. Like:
- CEO bloggers club: http://ceobloggers.xwiki.com which contains structures information
- Agora Wiki (in French): http://www.agorawiki.org which contains structured information and voting
There is still work to be done to make this even more easy to create such programs.. Lot of it can be done using Wizards written in XWiki pages themselves.
I definitely believe that an application wiki like JotSpot (or XWiki, hi Ludovic :) is a great platform for building situational software. I want to emphasize something that might not be clear from the Techdirt post: the application “components” in our gallery are in fact built inside the wiki from our own wiki markup — so any JotSpot user could build those applications or others. I also agree wholeheartedly that data integration is a key piece of functionality, which is why we use standards-based technology (XSLT, XPath, SOAP) to access data from remote sources. Anyway, thanks for mentioning us!