15 Oct
2009
15 Oct
'09
6:02 p.m.
Hi Anca,
On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:03 PM, Anca Luca <ancapaula.luca(a)xwiki.com>wrote;wrote:
Hello devs,
The current state of the annotation feature in the sandbox can be described
by
the following:
* there is a single type of annotation which can be added, using a specific
javascript client backed by a rest service. Such an annotation contains an
annotation text, the annotated content and its position and this type is
highly
coupled in the plugin implementation
* the backing annotation storage is based on components, currently with an
XWiki
objects implementation but a different service can be easily created (there
is
one implemented for Scribo annotations stored in RDF)
* for the moment, only xwiki documents and feed entries fetched by the
feedreader plugin can be used as targets for annotations (the annotated
documents), with the restriction that the content of the document is *not*
generated using scripting. A component can be implemented for a new type of
document but the current UI (the javascript client) is *specific to xwiki
documents*
* the javascript client (UI) is only in the state of a prototype: while
proving
that it works, it is not robust enough and the user experience is poor
* annotation creation algorithm seems to perform well in practice, but we
should
put it to more real-world test (by releasing).
Some *requirements* in terms of functionality, in order to make this an
extensible and flexible feature, would be to:
* be able to have different types of annotations (one to be able to easily
specify fields for the annotations to add), with storage as xwiki objects.
This
needs to be flexible at all levels: UI and storage backend, preferably
using
xwiki scripting (no jars on the server side, or java coding) so that it can
be
easily customized. Also, the annotation UI should be thought of as easy to
customize and create whatever forms and actions in a light manner.
I'm not sure I understand this one well. What exactly do you mean by
"different types of annotations"? From what I understand right now, this
means the following:
1. I select text and choose to annotate it
2. I select custom properties for my annotation (let's say additional
"city" & "country" fields)
3. I fill in those fields and save the annotation
4. My annotation is saved with those custom fields
If this is correct, I'm a bit afraid this will bring un-needed complexity
both to the UI and the backend implementation. From what I understood so far
it looks a bit like having the XClass editor each time ones creates a new
annotation -> isn't that overkill?
An alternative solution I was thinking about was to use only 1 field with a
semantic syntax & autosuggest (something like: @city:Paris @country:France).
Is that a possible option? Or maybe it doesn't make sense in the context or
your work?
Yet another option would be to offer a number of already configured types to
select from in a list when adding a new annotation.
* be able to annotate any type of document (object
inside such a document),
namely all or any number of text fields in such an object. Preferably this
should also be doable only using xwiki scripting or configuration.
Sounds good.
I would like to propose the following road to perfect this feature:
*Version 1.0* (somewhere in the timeframe of XE 2.1
RCs)
The aim would be to take feature out of sandbox preserving its current
features:
allowing to add a specific type of annotation saved as XWiki object on a
regular, non scripted XWiki Document. We should:
- format, improve comments, generally clean up the current code sandbox to
match
XWiki coding styles
- refactor packages and components to remove some dependencies issues and
increase flexibility
- simplify flow, stripping out all code which is not strictly needed by the
targeted functionality (such as the Feed entry handling code), and make it
easily implementable by a component in a distinct jar (so that the Scribo
requirements currently implemented can be preserved)
- finish the javascript client: robust user interaction, intuitive
interface,
cleaned up integration with XE
Do you plan on using GWT to achieve this? If not, what's the best way to
code it in a cross-browser, maintainable way? Using one of the JS library
already embedded in XWiki such as Prototype I guess?
- ensure quality assurance process by a well setup
battery of tests, unit
and
functional
At this point I propose to have the annotation feature as an installable
plugin
but not included by default in XE, unless after a few bugfixing cycles.
Plugin or component? (maybe this is the same thing under a different name)
*Version 1.1* (somwhere in the timeframe of XE 2.2, at the beginning of next
year)
* first iteration on the 2 desired features. At this point one should be
able to
configure the type of annotation to add, UI should be accomodate this type,
backing XWiki storage should be easy to integrate with any annotation
storage
service (for Scribo requirements), and one should easily set a field in a
structured document which would support annotations. (Note that this might
require heavy rewrite / refactor of the 1.0 version. We could decide to
skip it
and go straight to this version, but it would take longer.)
My personal point of view is that being able to annotate any part of a XWiki
document is more important than being able to configure the type of
annotation to add. Is there a hard requirement on the order from the Scribo
research project on this?
* integration of Scribo requirements can be met at
this point by setting
the
configurations according to the Scribo annotation type and target
requirements.
At this point, if we find appropriate, we could make the decision of
including
the annotation feature in XE by default
I guess that will depend on its quality by this time. I think it would be a
great addition to XE's default feature set.
*Version 1.2* (future)
* finish the 2 requirements, integration with Scribo
would be done in the
same
manner, by specific configuration and storage backend specific
implementation.
What do you think?
I think this can become a key differentiating feature of XWiki since I'm not
aware of any wiki that has them implemented yet. MS Word's annotation system
is widely used and I think XWiki annotation would resonate positively with
XWiki users coming from such text editors.
For the moment I will focus on version 1's tasks while finding a good
architecture to achieve the desired requirements,
converting, where
necessary,
the direction of the development towards that goal.
Thanks (for reading this very long mail),
:-)
Guillaume
Anca
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Guillaume Lerouge
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