[dokuwiki] Re: Google Summer of Code

----- Original Message ----
From: Michael Hamann <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

>Thanks for offering to mentor an Android app, my ideas are:
>- download all pages or certain pages using XML-RPC, possibly also media
>  files/referenced images
>- update offline pages based on the listing of all pages or the
>  changelog
>- view pages (either from cache or XML-RPC), internal links need to be
>  changed to be handled by the app
>- edit or create pages with a simple editor and upload using XML-RPC,
>  ability to store edited pages locally and upload as batch
>- for locally changed pages: either display them as plain text or render
>  some basics (like headings, lists, links, basic formatting, code
>  blocks)
>- upload photos (and other files), also using a queue
>
>All these features are available in the XML-RPC interface that already
>exists.

>
>As I don't know which components Android already provides or which can
>be easily used I don't know if we need to remove some features from the
>initial version.
>
>My general idea of that app is to make information from a dokuwiki
>installation available on mobile devices where you don't always have a
>good data connection and perhaps also provide a possibility for mobile
>blogging.
>

Android has the concept of a "content provider" that might be a good 
place to start.  The provider would use XML-RPC and handle all of the
caching and data sync and then allow anyone to easily build applications
based on their dokuwiki content. This would also avoid caching multiple
copies of the same content between multiple applications which is good 
especially for anyone who has a lot of content.  

The Android docs have a good overview if you want to take a quick look: 
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/providers/content-providers.html
 
There is an "android-xmlrpc" project at google code that might help to
speed things along but I haven't use it.

>These are just my ideas, I don't know what other people think/want. E.g.
>if the main focus shall be mobile blogging the app will probably be a
>bit different, but then we also need a XML-RPC interface for blogtng
>(which should be relatively easy to create, if needed I can implement
>that). I personally don't see the main focus on editing pages but on
>viewing pages offline with automatic updates of the offline version.


Definitely a good idea to poll users and rank features to find out what
would be the most useful as a mobile app.  If we go with the provider
approach, it would be easy to create different applications that would
meet the different needs of offline browsing, editing, and blogging and
like plugins and templates anyone could start building their own and
sharing them.
 
- jc


      
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