Saturday, September 27, 2003

Are you paying attention to what I've saying about the Alex Schroeder / OddMuse / Emacs connection below?

OddMuse can include any raw text from an application. That means you can wrap a script around a database and include it in an OddMuse page. You can also include RSS feeds, and you can generate your own. (Though it would be really nice if you had some more flexability over this.)

OddMuse supports various security models including "anyone can edit it", "editors with passwords can edit it, everyone else just reads", "editors with passwords edit it, everyone else can add comments but not change existing pages", "only people with passwords can read or write". And individual pages can be locked by an administrator while others can be edited.

Pages can be accessed and edited directly through Emacs. With a bit of work, that could be nicer.

OddMuse can act as a CVS repository, code tree, documentation management system, public discussion forum. All in one. With the important addition of hyperlinks between all pages of different types. And that it can generate news of all changes in RSS.

That's what it can do right now. It's all free. And very simple.

With a bit more work, Emacs access could be made comfortable, users could have more control over RSS outputs, and some kind of spider could crawl the pages and collect the code ready to be passed to a compiler.

This isn't going to scale to "enterprise" levels (whatever that vacuous term means). But it will scale to a team of programmers writing a few hundred classes and a few hundred more pages of documentation. For a programmer used to using emacs with CVS, the difference will be minimal.

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