Social Software

QEDWiki

QEDWiki is an IBM product to help user to create a Wiki website. QEDWiki is a browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mash-ups. QEDWiki is a unique Wiki framework in that it provides both Web users and developers with a single Web application framework for hosting and developing a broad range of Web 2.0 applications. QEDWiki can be used for a wide variety of Web applications, including Web content management for a typical collection of Wiki pages, traditional form processing for database-oriented CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) applications, document-based collaboration , rich interactive applications that bind together disparate services, and situational applications (or mash-ups).

QEDWiki also provides Web application developers with a flexible and extensible framework to enable do-it-yourself (DIY) rapid prototyping. Business users can quickly prototype and build ad hoc applications without depending on software engineers. QEDWiki provides mash-up enablers (programmers) with a framework for building reusable, tag-based commands. These commands (or widgets) can then be used by business users who wish to create their own Web applications.

QEDWiki is a lightweight mash-up maker written in PHP 5 and hosted on a LAMP, WAMP, or MAMP stack. A mash-up assembler will use QEDWiki to create a personalized, ad hoc Web application or mash-up by assembling a collection of widgets on a page, wiring them together to define the behavior of the mash-up application, and then possibly sharing the mash-up with others. Mash-up enablers provide QEDWiki with a collection of widgets that provide application domain- or information-specific functionality. These widgets are represented within QEDWiki as PHP scripts.

When a user renders a page within a QEDWiki workspace, the QEDWiki framework processes the widgets on the server side and then generates a DHTML page that is sent to the browser for client-side processing. The framework includes a rich AJAX-enabled MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture so that each wiki page is a rich, interactive application for end users.

By using QEDWiki, user who may not be programmers can create Web applications to address just-in-time ad hoc situational needs; they can also integrate data and mark-up using widgets to create new utilities. Users can bind rich content from disparate sources to create new ways to view information; they can also add behavior and relationships to disparate widgets to create a rich interactive application experience. QEDWiki can be used to quickly promote a mash-up for use by others and to enable multi-user collaboration on the development of a mash-up.

There is a new version of QEDWiki released recently, which includes some new features. It provides a new Widget Editor and Manager. Users now can now create and edit widgets and their configuration data inside QEDWiki within a wizard-like interface. The widgets can be JavaScript or PHP-based. Support is provided for widget persistence, packaging, and versioning. It also contains a user customizable palette. Users are now able to change palette drawer names as well as create a unique palette drawer into which they can store their favorite widgets. Users can also change the title that appears in the title bar of a widget on a per-instance basis as well as choose to have the title bar be hidden. The new wiki features have been added to QEDWiki, such as a page-level table of contents, improved wiki navigation, more traditional wiki mark-up, backlinks, and orphaned pages.

Posted at 01:24PM Jul 06, 2007 by Xuan Zhang in Wikis  |