Vincent Massol said:

Very nice Niels!

I think it would be great to have a similar interface for XWiki Watch one day.

Thanks! I agree that there is potential overlap between what I'm doing and Xwikiwatch. I'm certainly grateful for all the capabilities provided by http://svn.xwiki.org/svnroot/xwiki/platform/core/trunk/xwiki-core/src/main/j...... Like the feed plugin, it would be great if Xwikiwatch were more "componentizable" ... and that it didn't require extra AJAX support on the server side... What would be nice is a collection of little "panel-doclets" that you can lay out and connect up w/ HTML and javascript. Seems like a judicious use of iframe-able xwiki "sub documents" (generated by xpage=plain) into interactive sub-panels which take care of the AJAXy stuff w/o the extra complexity... One of the issues w/ Xwikiwatch is the local caching of feed items. This may be good for a closed intranet, but for internet-wide use as an aggregator, it raises issues of copyright violation -- storing whole copies of feeds or feed-entries. I haven't tried Xwikiwatch with podcast feeds: hopefully, it would end up *not* retrieving the media enclosure (e.g. mp3, mp4, flv, qt, etc) and just the description with a link to the enclosure(s). In order to not violate copyrights w/ xwiki watch, it would be great to have the existing behavior, except that the the feed item is downloaded from the original site when the user browses the "watch" page. On Xwikiwatch's end, it computes the DOM structure of the feed-entry; instead of storing the potentially copyrighted feed media (or HTML from a scraped web-site), it stores the digital signature of the DOM subtree for each node... When the user browses this "transclusion document" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion ), they are browsing the "live" site; the annotations from the "aggregator" site correctly overlay/highlight the original document. The two separate documents would attempt to automatically stay "in synch" by matching DOM structures & associated digital signatures. The Xwiki overlay annotation document tracks the original source document as it changes over time. The user is also presented with markups indicating new changes since the document was last discussed. Similarly, the same treatment for overlay annotation can be done for streaming media w/o violating copyrights. Niels http://nielsmayer.com PS: over at project simile, one of the feedbacks I got was "how come you didn't use Exhibit" to allow selection of categories from the 60+ podcast feeds you try to present. This is good feedback, as exhibit does offer a powerful and pretty interface that is remarkably flexible. It would be easy to dynamically generate JSON data from the Xwiki database to drive Exhibit. For example, note the JSON data below that creates the presentations below -- exhibit is doing all the work, which is codified in the "special language" of the Exhibit JSON file: http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/presidents/presidents.js --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/presidents/presidents.html http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/flags/data.json --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/flags/flags.html http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/cereals/cereal-characters.js --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/cereals/cereal-characters.html http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/billionaires/billionaires.js --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/billionaires/billionaires.html (scraping various .gov sites using http://simile.mit.edu/crowbar) --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/senate/senate.html http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/nobelists/nobelists.js --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/nobelists/nobelists.html http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/factbook/countries.js http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/factbook/government.js http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/factbook/people.js --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/factbook/factbook-people.html http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/CSAIL-PIs/people.js --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/CSAIL-PIs/CSAIL-PIs.html http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/cities/cities.js --> http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/cities/cities.html

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Dennis Coonich <[email protected]>wrote:

Amazing - was just looking into embedding applets into xwiki for streaming media from local or remote sources. You beat me to it. I would still like to integrate homegrown java ee applets, jsf and other java technologies. Can you point me to some good reference material? I teach java swing and java ee courses but have not looked at all into the depths of xwiki's framework(s).

Again - amazing work.

Thanks! That was sort of the "demo"/proof-of-concept version... i'm working on an update that should be more useful, and with 500+ NPR feeds including affiliate stations, a better selection/search mechanism using Exhibit ( e.g. http://simile-widgets.org/exhibit/examples/presidents/presidents.html ), etc. Wr/t your applet question, here's what I've found, and why I didn't bother with applets: Bottom line: applets cause problems and user complaints. Flash doesn't. For example: there's potential issues with IE & Java, if you use JMF in your applet ( http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/media/jmf/2.1.1/guide/JMFApp...), then you need to specially install the JMF jar on your browser ( http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/media/jmf/2.1.1/jmfdiagnosti...). The lack of an easy "one click" means of install (like w/ flash) to get JMF and Java installed multiplatform and consistently -- is a showstopper. At least for windows and IE, there's the "JMF Windows Performance Pack":

Microsoft IE with the JMF Windows Performance Pack and you still see this message, then its possible that you don't have the latest Microsoft Java VM for IE installed. Please visit http://www.microsoft.com/java and install the latest Java VM for your browser.

http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/ is sort of typical with what happens with video and applets. The page for the applet states to look at http://www.flumotion.com site to see the applet in action. And yet, all the video playing on the company's site is now done with flash and they're no longer using the applet. If you get anything working and integrated with Xwiki for media applets, please share. The more the merrier. What would be best is to have an overarching "smart" mechanism for detecting media playback capabilities, and determining the most optimal strategy "dynamically" based on client platform/plugins and media type/quality of streaming media for display. On Apr 10 I alluded to this in a message "integrating media streaming with xwiki? (was Re: [xwiki-devs] Problems with scripting)" ( http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg08533.html ) It would be nice to have a truly abstract streaming media macro that would

implement the same generic API for streaming media within Xwiki. The macro would determine at run-time, whether the browser is enabled with specific plugins needed to display a specific media type (such as the VLC moz plugin); if not available, the macro would dynamically switch-in the flash-based equivalent for people using IE or who don't want to install the VLC moz plugin. For example given a "mp4", the macro would first attempt to use VLC, on failure it might try the platform's browser-embeddable media presenter if media-compatible (e.g. MS windows media), and would finally try a "generic" flash player such as the Jeroen "JW" Wijering players ( http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/ ).

Due to the near ubiquitous installation of Itunes/Quicktime on most mac/windows systems -- the ability to automatically detect Quicktime plugin presence in the browser and determine if media is compatible would be a great feature to have in this "abstract/smart streaming macro" -- Niels http://nielsmayer.com