Realtime Wiki

I am playing around with Wiki tools. Because Zope is the platform on my current development agenda I looked into ZWiki. It offers full Plone integration and support for the ExternalEditor Extension (which means that I can click on small pens to edit pages inside my favorite text editor instead of a textarea inside the browser).

But what I would like to use is a wiki-enabled editor that allows clicking CamelCase words right after they are typed (which would create a new wiki page or open an existing one for editing).

VoodooPad does this (even with remote wikis). But currently it uses a proprietary Vpwiki API that is only supported by VoodooPads own server tool, by TWiki (with this experimental extension) and by the FreeCard project (FreeCard is planned to be an open source HyperCard clone). I could not yet find anyone trying a Vpwiki API Extension for ZWiki.

There are several other RPC API designs for wiki servers, for example: XmlRpcToWiki by 0xDECAFBAD (who has collected some links to some other efforts).

PersonalWiki is a graphical Wiki editor like VoodooPad that has an experimental and rudimentaty HTTP-based implementation for remote editing. It comes with an example script for a ZWiki site. Unfortunatly the usability is not very good: unlike VoodooPad you need to toggle Browse and Edit (the example script also has a syntax error that prevents saving existing pages).

So what if Peer-2-peer networking (or Rendezvous maybe) would be paired with such an editor? Editors would see the remote wiki and any change would be probagated to all connected clients.

And frankly: this has been an idea first sighted at Ray Ozzie’s weblog almost a year ago. And Hugh Pyle from UK needed just five hours to hack a tool with the Groove Web Services framework. He called it “Hyki” (from “Hydra” + “Wiki”; Hydra was the original name of SubEthaEdit). Insipred by this Tim Knip implemented something similar for Groove based on Flash.