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    1: Bookie is a personal attempt to keep the bookmarks that I have at home
    2: synced with the bookmarks I have at work, and a way of solving my
    3: frustrations in sharing bookmarks with other people over computers.  It also
    4: is an outgrowth of the bluesky <a
    5: href="http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/ui/199805/bookmarks.html">good
    6: bookmarking</a> and <a
    7: href="http://www.mozilla.org/blue-sky/misc/199805/collaborative-bookmark-index.html">collaborative
    8: bookmark indexing</a>.  In addition, there are sites which attack this
    9: 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>.
   10: 
   11: <p>Quite frankly, bookmark management sucks.  Every person I know has a
   12: collection of bookmarks which have grown over months if not years.  Not only
   13: the bookmarks themselves but the structure of the bookmark directory is
   14: critical.  Yahoo's origin and real, underlying purpose is as a huge
   15: collection of well organized bookmarks.  Yet while it is easy to send a URL
   16: over the web, sending branches or entire trees is impossible.  It is
   17: impossible to share the same bookmarks folder with several people, so that
   18: all information can be synced over a department.  And it's really hard to
   19: keep bookmarks synced between several locations.
   20: 
   21: <p>The roaming access feature in Netscape goes in the right direction of
   22: solving these problems, but RDF is the perfect answer to these problems.
   23: Whenever a browser wants to see bookmarks, it can make a request to a
   24: central bookmark server, and receive streamed RDF.  Likewise, whenever a
   25: bookmark or branch is submitted, RDF can be sent to the server and synced
   26: with all the other clients.
   27: 
   28: <p>Most of the work is already done -- Mozilla already has an
   29: RDFXMLDataSource, and all that needs to be done on the client end is some
   30: work to hook it into the network layer, and a way to present that data as a
   31: treeview.
   32: 
   33: <p>The more involved work is in writing a server which can parse RDF,
   34: construct an internal RDF graph, and can convert the internal RDF graph into
   35: an SQL database.  And writing it out the other way.
   36: <pre>
   37: 	 serialized RDF <--> RDF graph <--> SQL database
   38: </pre>
   39: <p> Of course, this is barely scratching the surface of what Bookie could do
   40: -- it could invalidate useless bookmarks, keep a cache of bookmarks for
   41: you... it could keep private bookmark folders which you could only see by
   42: typing a password... It could provide folders with multiple parents so that
   43: you could have the equivalent of symlinks in folders... It could rearrange
   44: or delete bookmarks according to your own criteria (popularity, last
   45: updated)... You could have limited access to bookie allowing you to add only
   46: annotations to a bookmark, or submit links on an honor system so that the
   47: most popular float to the top...  You could adjust your filter so that only
   48: the oldest or the newest bookmarks show up.
   49: 
   50: <p>Anyway...
   51: 
   52: <p> The server is done, although it still is read-only.  You can import
   53: bookmarks into the database and you can read bookmarks out of the server.
   54: The mozilla client will connect to the server, but I've had some troubles
   55: getting the RDF from the server synced up with the user interface.  There's
   56: also a client written in Swing which I'm using for debugging, which is
   57: teaching me the joys of asynchronous non-blocking network IO in Java.
   58: 
   59: