perl – Page 2 – jig.tools

fastest foswiki (and TWiki) ever – MongoDB for foswiki milestone 4

When the foswiki on MongoDB project started, this query would take 5.4 seconds to provide the html to the client (pure CGI), now it takes 0.7seconds (with mod_fcgid).

Thats a speedup of over 7 times.

I realised today that I’ve not written up a progress post for foswiki on MongoDB for a bit – and so did a few benchmarks again.

The benchmarks given (at http://foswiki.org/Development/MongoDBPlugin ) are for a structured query on a DataForm based web containing 25,000 topics, and are run on a desktop system running a 1.8GHz core2duo with 2G RAM.

When the foswiki on MongoDB project started, this query would take 5.4 seconds to provide the html to the client (pure CGI), now it takes 0.7seconds (with mod_fcgid).

That’s a speed-up of over 7 times.

Many other large web queries, like a WebIndex on a large web couldn’t even complete before, and now run in a usable fashion.

This milestone we’re separating out each web into its own database, and I’ll be adding in the topic revision information to the database too – that way it won’t matter if you have 10,000 webs, or 1,000,000 – the speed should be essentially constant (so long as you have the server resources to match your loads).

If noSQL isn’t suitable, and you would like to see a similar back-end developed using an SQL engine – contact me – WikiRing and fosiki are looking for interested companies with foswiki (and TWiki) scaling issues – without real life testing, examples and stakeholders, its extremely difficult find the many corner cases that our complex engine can allow.

Almost a week after LCA2011 is finished….

and I still have 300 browser tabs open from the small proportion of talks I wanted to go to.

Open source conferences are astounding, hyper-rich information funnels, where hundreds of bright, enthused people open each other’s eyes to little details and big projects that can help us do more.

wow – I hope I can find the time to go to LCA2012 in Ballarat next year.

Thankyou everyone for a really fun LCA2011 in Brisbane

Google’s DataWiki experiment

Google Labs has just added DataWiki – it looks like one of the features Foswiki (and its parent) have been doing for 10 years…

Google Labs has just added a GoogleAppEngine based Java application called – DataWiki.

So far, project information is very minimal, but it looks like one of the features Foswiki (and its parent) have been doing for 10 years…

The timing is excellent, as I’ve been working with others in the Foswiki Community to improve Foswiki’s mashup-ability:

enable easy input/output from a variety of endpoints, e.g. via Twitter, ODK or SMS from a remote location

Right now we’re working on a proper REST API for foswiki data – enabling us to retrieve and save changes to datasets in formats that are convenient to the external endpoints – and to simplify the development to dynamic visualisation and editing tools for complex data.

Perhaps what we’re looking at is a combination of the acquired and shut down JotSpot, and a response to Yahoo Pipes 🙂

Foswiki is an extremely mature (10 years) DataWiki capable enterprise wiki, with significant traction in workplaces around the world, and a strong, motivated developer and user community.

Edit foswiki files in Microsoft Office

Using the WebDAV for foswiki Extension, you can seamlessly edit Microsoft Office files in Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and then save directly back into the Wiki.

Using the WebDAV for foswiki Extension, you can seamlessly edit Microsoft Office files in Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and then save directly back into the Wiki.

Using WebDAV, users can get direct access to Wiki topics and attachments, via the WebDAV URL – making it possible to attach documents by drag and dropping them directly in Windows Explorer.

Some technical details

WebDAV for foswiki requires advanced libraries on the server – including Apache 2 mod_perl support. For full integration mode, some trust settings need to be changed in Internet Explorer, or an extension installed to Firefox.

Required Perl modules and extensions

APR::Table
APR::UUID
Apache2::Access
Apache2::Const
Apache2::Module
Apache2::RequestIO
Apache2::RequestRec
Data::Dumper
Encode
File::Find::Rule::Filesys::Virtual
File::Spec
POSIX
URI
URI::Escape
XML::LibXML => than 1.64 (declaredPrefix function is needed)
XML::Simple
Filesys::Virtual
POSIX
File::Path
JSON

Foswiki::Plugins::JQueryPlugin

New Dynamic jquery mb.Menus for foswiki

I’ve just started work adding Matteo Bicocchi’s rather stunning mb.Components – starting with mb.Menu. Along the way, adding foswiki Macro’s to make it simpler for us to use, I’ve also made some changes to the code (which hopefully I can get integrated into an mb.Menu release) that I have attached to the live demo.

Here’s the all important Screenie:

Foswiki 1.1 release on its way.

I haven’t been blogging for a while, because I’ve been devoting all my time to working on features for the next Foswiki release.

We’re aiming to get it out the door in June 2010 – and to make this timeline, we’re about to go into feature freeze mode – and the end of this month.

So far, result paging support for SEARCH is almost done, I’ve upgraded the icons we ship to the attractive FamFamFam icon set, simplified the Template definitions for skinning SEARCH results, improved the handling of the zeroresults parameter, and I’ve completed much of the FOREACH/format extraction code refactor.

I’m looking forward to the next month’s bug finding fest 🙂

foswiki for windows updated to version 1.0.8

foswiki 1.0.8 and windows installer released

I built and uploaded foswiki 1.0.8 installer for windows last night – hope you like it, cos i’ll be on holidays for a few days 🙂

For the last 2 weeks I’ve been working on an SAP connector for foswiki – I can display most SAP Tables, and call most SAP functions – all via ‘RFC’ – right now we’re working towards a proactive system healthcheck report, but it pretty much will allow us to build any SAP process right into foswiki. Cool huh.

and for fun I’ve been working on making a replacement DocumentGraphics icon set based on FamFamFamContrib for foswiki – the 10 year old hand drawn one really is dated.

foswiki – wow.

Our project fork hit the one year milestone a week or so ago, and Arthur noticed this amazing ‘factoid’ on ohloh..

Very large, active development team

Over the past twelve months, 36 developers contributed new code to Foswiki.

This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh.

For this measurement, Ohloh considered only recent changes to the code. Over the entire history of the project, 43 developers have contributed.

All I can say, is WOW and thank you, to everyone that has worked on our project, and to all who discover it.

The Foswiki Association & Summit is happening in Hannover at the end of this month – I wish I could be there, but its a long way from Australia – maybe next year 🙂

I’ve been working on a Foswiki User administration user interface again

This iteration I’ve been working using the HTTPDUserAdminContrib – as having the users and groups in the database makes it hard to work on.

UserManagementUI

Hopefully there’ll be time to use and extend it for foswiki 1.1

Foswiki 1.0.7 on a USB Stick

I’ve updated the USB Foswiki to include foswiki 1.0.7, and updated the systray controller to be a little more slick 🙂

I’m still looking for feedback from users – Its a nice fast way to try out foswiki without needing to install anything – just unzip the archive into the root of a disk, and click start_foswiki.bat (on Windows XP the autorun should start that automatically for you)