Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Welcome to Developer
Welcome to developer.xythos.com. It is in this space, that I hope to indulge in some "different" ideas in file management and work with others in a community to advance how people work with unstructured information. As more and more file information is moving to applications on the web (blogs, podcasts, picture albums, work documents, wikis, etc) it is becoming necessary to have a common web service for storage.
Envision a world where storage is a resource you can use from anywhere. Open Standards allow users and applications to securely access information from anywhere. Thus, I can allow a web based word processor to have access to my storage location here at Xythos. Separating the storage from the applications allows me to keep all of my stuff in one location (securely here at Xythos), but use ANY application. Imagine if snapfish allowed me to print, crop, and edit my pictures, but stored them on my central server. Thus giving me one location for all of my information, yet access to the world's applications!!
We hope to create a network of developers here at this website over the next few months to work on problems and ideas with file management, both for an individual and for collaboration for a group.
Today I have donated some code and examples to this site. While none of it should be considered production level code, I believe it's a good starting ground for a number of possible projects that can be worked on here.
a) Xythos and Eclipse -- setup guide for running Xythos and the default shipping Tomcat within Eclipse (great for debugging).
b) Xythos and Konfabulator -- A JavaScript library that can access Xythos (Upload, directory listing, move, copy, etc). I can only imaging the widgets that can be created, here hopefully is the first step, the layer to talk to the storage web service.
c) Xythos Pictures -- A small Servlet that generates thumnails and picture albulms from uploaded pictures. The most interesting part to me is that picture name and description are stored as meta-data. If you don't like the way the album looks, create your own. The meta-data is there for you to work with. It's stored with the Object and NOT in the application!!!!
Welcome to developer.xythos.com. It is in this space, that I hope to indulge in some "different" ideas in file management and work with others in a community to advance how people work with unstructured information. As more and more file information is moving to applications on the web (blogs, podcasts, picture albums, work documents, wikis, etc) it is becoming necessary to have a common web service for storage.
Envision a world where storage is a resource you can use from anywhere. Open Standards allow users and applications to securely access information from anywhere. Thus, I can allow a web based word processor to have access to my storage location here at Xythos. Separating the storage from the applications allows me to keep all of my stuff in one location (securely here at Xythos), but use ANY application. Imagine if snapfish allowed me to print, crop, and edit my pictures, but stored them on my central server. Thus giving me one location for all of my information, yet access to the world's applications!!
We hope to create a network of developers here at this website over the next few months to work on problems and ideas with file management, both for an individual and for collaboration for a group.
Today I have donated some code and examples to this site. While none of it should be considered production level code, I believe it's a good starting ground for a number of possible projects that can be worked on here.
a) Xythos and Eclipse -- setup guide for running Xythos and the default shipping Tomcat within Eclipse (great for debugging).
b) Xythos and Konfabulator -- A JavaScript library that can access Xythos (Upload, directory listing, move, copy, etc). I can only imaging the widgets that can be created, here hopefully is the first step, the layer to talk to the storage web service.
c) Xythos Pictures -- A small Servlet that generates thumnails and picture albulms from uploaded pictures. The most interesting part to me is that picture name and description are stored as meta-data. If you don't like the way the album looks, create your own. The meta-data is there for you to work with. It's stored with the Object and NOT in the application!!!!