WikiWeb

PublicReengineering Wiki

The page you are reading was (at some point) generated dynamically from a database of information by a program on a web server. The information in the database can be modified by anyone and this leads to the creation of a truly collaborative web site.

If you are a newcomer and want to know how to get started with this site, then please see GettingStartedWithWiki.

The original Wiki was invented by WardCunningham? and was then called Wiki Wiki. It was built for the Pattern Languages community to aid in the collaborative creation and documentation of software patterns. To see this Wiki in action, and get more information on Wikis in general go to http://www.c2.com.

I have chosen to call this particular Wiki (rather unimaginatively), DolphinWikiWeb. It is implemented as bunch of Perl scripts that were derived from another Wiki clone called JOS Wiki[1]. Our implementation is available for download at DolphinWikiWeb.

DolphinWikiWeb Advantages

There are a number of advantages that DolphinWikiWeb has (I hope) over some other Wiki implementations.

  • Pages are kept as separate text files rather than in a Perl DBM. This avoid the 1K limit in some versions of DBM and, I think, its more secure.

  • Pages are additionally rendered as true HTML files which are fed back to your browser. This means that when a page is revisited it can be pulled straight from the browser's cache which is obviously much faster than having to re-submit a request to the Wiki server program. This does have a few ramifications for WikiWebBrowsing.

  • All of the HTML is generated using template files that can be created using a standard HTML editor such as Microsoft Frontpage. This makes it easy to give a new look and feel to future webs without having to get in and modify Perl script.

  • The WikiTextFormattingRules allow for the inclusion of small chunks of HTML. You're encouraged to use this feature sparingly, however.

  • A page can be deleted if no other page has references to it.

  • All changes to pages are logged. If a page is deleted, the log file remains. Although there is, as yet, no easy way to revert to a previous version of a page, the information is available to do this manually, if necessary.

  • The Perl code can control several webs on the same server without having to be tailored for each.

Related pages: WikiBeginnersTopics

This page last edited on 17 December 1998
 
 
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