David Ornstein's WebLog

I'm a Lead Program Manager in the Digital Documents group at Microsoft; we're part of the Windows team.

This is outta hand - Behavior Expression Language for FlexWiki

OK. So one of the capabilities of FlexWiki that is just starting to be tapped is WikiBehaviors. These are the bridge to smart (i.e., code-based) capabilities that let you put dynamic content on your wiki pages. For example, you can use @@Now@@ to put the current time on. Or you can use the new XmlTransformWikiBehavior to insert the results of XSLT transformed XML into your page (e.g., showing an RSS feed right on a Wiki page). This is the primary extensibility mechanism for FlexWiki and it needs some more power. For example, wouldn't it be cool if the whole sidebar on the right on the FlexWiki pages could be customized (without changing source code)? What if that sidebar were all built as a wiki page that admins could edit and if it were all built from some new WikiBehaviors? To do this would require a pile of new behaviors (or, actually, surfacing existing code as behaviors). It would also probably require a much more powerful behavior language. I have started the design for both of these things. See WikiBehaviorExpansionProject. I must be mad. It's not as if I don't have enough to do in my day job. I'm not sure if I will be able to put any serious time into implementing this any time soon, but maybe I will. And I wanted to get the design and the ideas out in the open -- collaboration collaboration collaboration.
Published Sunday, January 25, 2004 6:25 PM by dornstein
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Comments

 

jsled said:

TWiki [www.twiki.org] has been doing this for quite a while ...
January 25, 2004 9:14 PM
 

Mike Polson said:

Wow, talk about "scope creep", but at least it's a labor of love :)

You might be able to enlist the newest 'softie into your endevours. Did you see we hired Ward Cunningham? http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/158020_msftnotebook26.html

Keep up the great work - FlexWiki is turning out to be a great tool.

January 26, 2004 9:28 AM
 

Don Park said:

David, any particular reason for syntatically distinguishing WikiBehaviors from WikiWords? Is it because WikiBehaviors are expanded inlined where WikiWords are linked?
February 16, 2004 5:47 PM
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Welcome to my blog. I am David Ornstein and I work at Microsoft. You're probably here either because you know me and are interested in what I'm up to or you want to find out more about FlexWiki, the wiki implementation I (and a few others) wrote.


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