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version 1.5, 2000/11/27 02:07:35
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version 1.16, 2001/03/19 11:08:24
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| Bookie is a personal attempt to keep the bookmarks that I have at home | You can read what Bookie is <a href="purpose.html">here</a>, but here's the |
| synced with the bookmarks I have at work, and a way of solving my | long and short of it: |
| frustrations in sharing bookmarks with other people over computers. It also | |
| is an outgrowth of the bluesky <a | <blockquote> |
| href="http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/ui/199805/bookmarks.html">good | Bookie is an application which keeps all your bookmarks on a |
| bookmarking</a> and <a | central server so that you can access bookmarks from anywhere on the web. |
| href="http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/collaborative-bookmark-index.html">collaborative | </blockquote> |
| bookmark indexing</a>. In addition, there are sites which attack this | |
| problem from another angle: <a href="http://renaghan.com/bookmarker/">Bookmarker</a> and <a href="http://www.webwizards.net/useful/wbbm.htm">Web-Based Bookmark Managers</a>. | <p>I have a server which is currently using a hacked up protocol based on FTP. |
| I have since learned why no-one uses a protocol from the 1970's if they can |
| <p>Quite frankly, bookmark management sucks. Every person I know has a | help it: the code is going to go away and be replaced with XML-RPC, which is |
| collection of bookmarks which have grown over months if not years. Not only | both simpler and more intelligent. |
| the bookmarks themselves but the structure of the bookmark directory is | |
| critical. Yahoo's origin and real, underlying purpose is as a huge | <p>Mozilla client is still very rudimentary, but it does do XML-RPC queries. |
| collection of well organized bookmarks. Yet while it is easy to send a URL | If you enjoy pain or would like to help, then you can pick up the code from |
| over the web, sending branches or entire trees is impossible. It is | <a href="/source/browse/bookie/clients/mozilla/extensions/bookie/resources">here</a>. |
| impossible to share the same bookmarks folder with several people, so that | Thanks to Aaron Andersen for the cool <a |
| all information can be synced over a department. And it's really hard to | href="http://www.xulplanet.com/tutorials/xulapp/">tutorial</a>. |
| keep bookmarks synced between several locations. | |
| <p>You do have to have the XML-RPC extensions to use the client. Go to your |
| <p>The roaming access feature in Netscape goes in the right direction of | mozilla/extensions/xml-rpc directory and <code>"nmake -f |
| solving these problems, but RDF is the perfect answer to these problems. | makefile.win"</code> should take care of the problem. |
| Whenever a browser wants to see bookmarks, it can make a request to a | |
| central bookmark server, and receive streamed RDF. Likewise, whenever a | <p>Will Sargent <<a href="mailto:will_sargent@yahoo.com">will_sargent@yahoo.com</a>> |
| bookmark or branch is submitted, RDF can be sent to the server and synced | |
| with all the other clients. | |
| |
| <p>Most of the work is already done -- Mozilla already has an | |
| RDFXMLDataSource, and all that needs to be done on the client end is some | |
| work to hook it into the network layer, and a way to present that data as a | |
| treeview. | |
| |
| <p>The more involved work is in writing a server which can parse RDF, | |
| construct an internal RDF graph, and can convert the internal RDF graph into | |
| an SQL database. And writing it out the other way. | |
| |
| serialized RDF <--> RDF graph <--> SQL database | |
| |
| <p> Of course, this is barely scratching the surface of what Bookie could do | |
| -- it could invalidate useless bookmarks, keep a cache of bookmarks for | |
| you... it could keep private bookmark folders which you could only see by | |
| typing a password... It could provide folders with multiple parents so that | |
| you could have the equivalent of symlinks in folders... It could rearrange | |
| or delete bookmarks according to your own criteria (popularity, last | |
| updated)... You could have limited access to bookie allowing you to add only | |
| annotations to a bookmark, or submit links on an honor system so that the | |
| most popular float to the top... You could adjust your filter so that only | |
| the oldest or the newest bookmarks show up. | |
| |
| <p>Anyway... | |
| |
| <p> The server is done, although it still is read-only. You can import | |
| bookmarks into the database and you can read bookmarks out of the server. | |
| The mozilla client will connect to the server, but I've had some troubles | |
| getting the RDF from the server synced up with the user interface. There's | |
| also a client written in Swing which I'm using for debugging, which is | |
| teaching me the joys of asynchronous non-blocking network IO in Java. | |
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