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TikiWidget
Target: TikiWiki 4.0
Table of contents
Preamble
TikiWidget is a cross-platform project targetted to be written in Java that provides a low-resource desktop interface to TikiWiki Watches, assignments, and the file gallery. The goal is to provide instantaneous desktop alerts in the event that resources on a user's system prevents them from having an email and/or web browser loaded. TikiWidget will alert the user when a watch or assignment is triggered, and give them basic information within the application on the circumstances for the alert, and give the user the option of going to the web page via their browser to address it. The project is still in its planning stages, but it is expected that in the least, it will use XML-RPC for a lot of the back-end communication with the website, with some information possibly coming via http.
The TikiWidget Project
The TikiWidget Project is being organized by Mike Kerr (kerrnel22). It is an open source project planned to be licensed under LGPL3. At some point it may make sense for this to somehow get bundled in with TikiWiki, but for the meantime, it is a standalone support project.
In order for the project to work as intended, some shoring-up of the TikiWiki XML-RPC code and minor tweaking on how watches and such behave will need to be addressed. As some coding will need to be done, full integration is not planned until TikiWiki 4.0. In the interim, it is proposed that once the TikiWidget application has the GUI to a certain point, and basic interfacing is working with TikiWiki, then a new development branch will be forked off of the main trunk.
Work on interfacing between Wiki and Widget will continue in this branch, with merges from trunk coming in to keep on pace with normal Tiki development. Once testing has completed, it should be fairly simple to merge the development branch back in with the main trunk in anticipation of 4.0 release in fall 2009.
Looking for Programmers
My (kerrnel22) personal skills are with Perl and PHP. I have picked up some Java along the way, but not nearly enough to complete this project on my own. Development of the project is being done with Java SDK 6 with NetBeans IDE. I have nearly finished the initial design of the GUI and will shortly be putting that up on Sourceforge. We will be using SVN as the version control system. Most of the underlying systems and tools for this project, to include licensing, have been based off of those used for TikiWiki, moreso for consistency than anything, but in some cases for compatibility.
If you are interested in participating in this project, even if you don't know a lot of Java but want to work on the php-side with the TikiWiki branch, please send me an email, post in one of the forums from the project page on Sourceforge, add a comment to this page, or add your name at the bottom of this page.