(PDF) [IEEE 2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies (WICT) - Mumbai, India (2011.12.11-2011.12.14)] 2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies

Enhancing Web Technology through Wiki-shell

Architecture

1Robin Singh Bhadoria 2Manish Dixit

Dept of CSE Dept of CSE

IITM, Gwalior (MP)-INDIA MITS, Gwalior(MP)-INDIA 1

Email: [emailprotected] 2Email:[emailprotected]

3Varun Mishra

4Kuldeep Singh Jadon

M.Tech (Software System) M.Tech (Software System)

SATI,Vidisha(MP)-INDIA SATI,Vidisha(MP)-INDIA

3Email: [emailprotected]

4E-mail: [emailprotected]

Abstract: The usage of World Wide Web(WWW) and

Internet has increased tremendously in the past decade.

WWW has changed the way humans now communicate.

Initially when WWW was built, it was an application

running on the internet. But now web has itself become a

platform and numerous applications have been built making

use of web-technology stack which run over the WWW.

Online shopping portals and online automated systems, for

e.g. Amazon and online railway ticket booking, are two

hugely popular applications built using the same. Wiki is

another such application exemplified by Wikipedia which

has become one of the biggest knowledge repositories.

Wiki has proven to be an excellent collaboration tool and

lot of companies and organisations are using it for various

projects and team management.

Typically a web application is developed using an

application server and a database server like the LAMP

stack where Apache is used as web server, MySQL engine

is used as the database engine and PHP is used as server-

side programming language. In this work, we present a

design on how to integrate a Wiki into the current

architecture and demonstrate its feasibility. By making use

of Wiki engine as a component in the web technology

stack, people can build lot of web applications, depending

on their needs, in a very easy and convenient way. It can be

used in many different scenarios. We have also built a

command like application known as Wiki Shell using

which people can write queries to fetch information from

Wiki Engine.

I. INTRODUCTION

The World Wide Web was developed with an

intention to create a pool of human knowledge which

people across time and space could share. WWW used to

be a simple application running over the internet.

However, as time progressed lots of advancements took

place and Web has now become a platform. In the last

decade the percentage of people using internet has grown

drastically. Numerous applications have been built now

using web as a platform. Social Networking sites, Wikis,

Online shopping portals, e-governance sites etc. are

examples of web applications. Web has changed the way

humans now live and collaborate. Almost everything is

available on the web now.

Figure 1.1: Evolution of WWW.

The system architecture defines how the pieces of the

application interact with each other, and what functionality

each piece is responsible for performing. Architecture of

web applications can be best defined by client-server

model [3]. The runtime image of a web application can be

depicted in the way as shown in figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: Segmentation of Component

Wiki is a web application that allows users to

create and edit interlinked web pages in an easy and

collaborative manner. Wikis are becoming increasingly

popular. This is quite evident from the number of clicks

Wikipedia has everyday. During the period from 2001 to

early 2007, about 1.6 million articles were written on

Wikipedia [7]. Wiki software and platforms have gained

attention as a technology that promises to change forms of

work, education and commerce [8]. Wikis have become a

popular format for sharing knowledge among people with

common interests in academia and professional domains

[9]. Wiki has also been proven as an excellent platform

for cross-cultural collaboration [10].

Figure 1.3: Wiki as platform.

In this paper, we have pushed a Wiki engine into

the web technology stack just like sometime back

database engine was pushed. So now Wiki will also

become a platform(as shown in figure 1.3) and developers

will be able to make use of it for building complex web

applications. Making use of Wiki one can make lots of

web applications in a very easy and convenient manner. We

have also built a command line application known as Wiki

Shell using which users can write queries and can get the

required information quickly. One does not need to learn

anything new to edit a Wiki. It is like editing normal text.

Thus editing a Wiki page is easier compared to editing a

table in RDBMS or editing some text in HTML pages.

Therefore, information providers can directly edit Wiki

pages themselves and the web-pages will also get updated

automatically. Wiki provides another layer of abstraction

over database engine and hence is easy to visualize. This

will eliminate the need for having a database administrator

for maintaining web applications.

II. WIKI ENGINE AS COMPONENT The power of Wiki lies in simple usage and less

technical hurdles. To use a Wiki, clients (end users)

require no additional training or software. They can view

and edit a Wiki page inside a web browser. They need not

learn Hypertext markup language. Editing of Wiki pages is

done using extremely simple rules which are very easy to

remember as well. Typically every Wiki engine has the

following features –

• Edit: Wiki allows its users to edit Wiki pages.

• Inter-links: Each Wiki page can be linked to other Wiki

pages.

• Recent Changes: Wiki keeps a log of recent changes

made to Wiki pages.

Figure 2.1: Visualization of Wiki

• Version: Wiki also keeps previous versions of a Wiki

page so that users can roll back to the previous version if

they want to.

• Search: Wiki allows users to search for a Wiki page. As

each Wiki page has a unique title, Wiki allows searching

for Wiki pages.

A. Architecture of Wiki Engines

The architecture of Wiki is similar to that of a

database driven website. Wiki software, also known as

Wiki engine, is a server side script whose purpose is to

render Wiki pages which can be viewed inside a web

browser. The content of a Wiki page is written in simple

text which is then stored in a database. The Wiki text also

has some rules which specify how the text should be

rendered inside the browser.

When a Wiki page is accessed, client's browser

sends request to the server. Server extracts data from

database engine which is simple text in Wiki format. Wiki

script then translates this text into HTML and the web

84 2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies

server sends it back to the browser and this is how users

view Wiki pages.

Figure 2.2: Work Flow of Wiki Engine

Let us look at the case of mediawiki engine [11].

In mediawiki, PHP is used as a server-side scripting

language and MySQL as the database engine. PHP reads

simple text from the MySQL engine and then checks this

text line by line and replaces formatting rules of Wiki text

by HTML constructs.

The architecture for web applications running

over Wiki engine is still client-server model but with a

one change. Now a Wiki Engine also sits along with a

Database Engine. Wiki Engine communicates with

application server and transfers required data to it which

is then sent to the client's browser. Figure 2.3

demonstrates this architecture:

Figure 2.3: Architecture for web applications running over

Wiki

The workflow in the applications running over

Wiki is similar to the database-driven websites with only

one change. The change is that this time the data will be

fetched from the Wiki engine. Figure 2.4 represents the

workflow.

• Client sends a request for a web page to web server.

• Web server reads the request and runs the server side

script.

• The script then executes the code and when the query

comes, it

is sent to the Wiki Interpreter.

Figure 2.4: Workflow of web applications running over Wiki

engine

• Wiki Interpreter then returns the required data by

extracting

from Wiki and then converting the same into HTML, to

the

daemon executing the server-side script.

• Web server sends back the generated HTML content to

the client

which is displayed in his/her browser.

B. Algorithm to Query Wiki

We have built an interpreter which takes a query

string as an input and returns a list of Nodes containing the

required data. We have named it Wiki Interpreter. Before

discussing the algorithm let us look at a couple of

underlying assumptions that we have made while

implementing it. One of them is that the title of every Wiki

page is unique. No two Wiki pages can the have same title

and most of the popular Wiki engines do not allow users to

create two Wiki pages with same title. Another one is that a

Wiki engine has a search feature which allows users to

search for a Wiki page. User only specifies the title of the

Wiki page that he wants to see. The Wiki interpreter then

makes use of the Wiki search feature and fetches the

required page.

2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies 85

Figure 2.5: Algorithm to query a Wiki engine

Using Wiki Query Language[16], developers can

construct queries by wrapping actions around one another.

The list will keep on changing and at the end the developer

will have the required information. Let us now look at how

all this works. Initially, Wiki interpreter receives query

string either from a server side scripting language(JSP or

WSL[16]).

After receiving it, the interpreter parses the string

to know what needs to be done. Every time an action is

performed a list of Nodes is created and the subsequent

actions are then performed on the entire list. Now, when

Wiki interpreter fetches the data from Wiki it is in Wiki

text format and therefore, the list will also have the data in

Wiki format only.

However, for web application we need to return

data in HTML format so that it can be displayed inside a

web browser. So for that we have written a parser which

converts Wiki text into HTML. When the final list is

generated after executing the entire query, it is passed to

this Wiki-to-HTML parser and the text contained in the list

gets converted into HTML. This list is then returned to the

daemon executing server-side script(JSP or WSL). Figure

2.5 explains this algorithm.

III. WIKI SHELL We have built a command-line application known

as Wiki Shell which provides an easy and a faster way to

evaluate WSL expressions and get data from the Wiki. It

enables users to do quick prototyping and testing with

minimal fuss. To write complete WSL code, one needs to

add HTML tags. However, if someone simply wants to

check and validate the queries, Wiki Shell comes really

handy as here one does not have to worry about adding

HTML tags. Figure 3.1 shows the welcome screen of Wiki

Shell.

Figure 3.1: Welcome Screen of Wiki Shell.

Wiki Shell has been made by making changes in the

Groovy Shell also known as groovysh. We added our

functions to the Groovy Shell code and had to modify few

things. Groovy Shell supports several command line

options and arguments to control verbosity, ANSI

colouring and other features. The Wiki Shell understands

WSL syntax and evaluates expressions which are in WSL

syntax only.

# Wiki Shell variables are all un-typed. This will set a shell

variable

wsl:000> x = "Hello"

Users can now use this shell variable in later expressions.

For e.g. -

wsl:000> echo x

Figure 3.2: Evaluation of above queries on wiki shell

A. How to get started?

• Download the groovyshell zip file that we have provided.

• Extract the same in a directory/folder of your choice. The

extracted folder will look like as follows –

The extracted folder will look like as follows

86 2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies

Figure 3.3: Process of Downloading Groovyshell

• Copy the .groovy folder present in this folder into C:/

Users <User Id> in case of Windows.

• Open command prompt or the terminal.

• Change directory to the location where groovyshell

folder has been extracted.

• Go to the bin folder present in that folder.

• Run wikish and you are ready to go.

IV. CONCLUSION A Wiki engine as a component in the technology

stack enables developers to make complex web applications

in an easy and convenient way. Wiki will become a

platform and lots of web applications can be built using

Wiki engines. It will find its usage in many different

scenarios. It will definitely reduce the development time as

time spent on database designing and form creation is

saved. Moreover, it is easier to edit information in a Wiki

page and this ensures that the web applications will always

have the current data. Using Wiki to build web applications

will eliminate the need of having a database administrator

as Wiki itself is a web application which can be accessed

through a web browser and anyone can maintain it.

REFERENCES [1] David F. DelGreco, "The World-Wide Web: a quick tour", ACM

SIGLINK, vol. 2, issue -2, pp. 8-9, September 1993.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=164399.164405. [2] Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk

Nielsen, Arthur Secret, "The World Wide Web", Communications of the

ACM, vol. 37, issue 8, pp. 76-82, August 1994. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=179606.179671.

[3] Sven Ziemer, "An Architecture for Web Applications", Essay in DIF

8914 Distributed Information Systems, November 2002. [4] Weiquan Zhao and David Kearney, "Deriving Architectures of Web-

Based Applications", Proceedings of the 5th Asia-Pacific web conference

on Web technologies and applications, pp. 301-312, 2003 [5] http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/02/22/february 2010 web

server survey.html

[6] D. A. Keim, H.P. Kriegel, "Issues in Visualizing Large Databases", Proc. Int. Conf. on Visual Database Systems (VDB-3), March 1995.

[7] Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, Richard Heigl, Alexander Warta, "Wiki Web Collaboration", Springer, 2005

[8] Tapscott. D. and Williams, A.D. 2007 Wikinomics. How Mass

Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin. NewYork. [9] Leuf, B. and Cunningham, W. The Wiki Way, Addison Wesley,

Longman, 2001.

[10] Nicole Schadewitz and Norhayati Zakaria, "Cross-cultural Collaboration Wiki Evolving Knowledge about International Teamwork",

Proceeding of the 2009 international workshop on Intercultural

collaboration, pp. 301-304, 2009.

[11] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How does MediaWiki work [12] Peter Buneman, "Semistructured data", Proceedings of the sixteenth

ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database

systems, pp. 117-121, 1997 [13] Serge Abiteboul, "Querying Semi-Structured Data", Proceedings of

the 6th International Conference on Database Theory, pp. 1-18, 1997

[14] http://www.w3.org/XML [15] http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

[16] Kaipa Kartik, "Design and implementation of a Wiki Query Language

and a Wiki Scripting Language", Masters' Thesis, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, July 2010.

[17] Eric T Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra,

"Head First Design Patterns", O'Reilly Media, October 2004, first edition. [18] http://www.antlr.org/about.html

2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies 87

(PDF) [IEEE 2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies (WICT) - Mumbai, India (2011.12.11-2011.12.14)] 2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies - DOKUMEN.TIPS (2024)

References