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by Bill de hÓra.
Original Post: Managing stuff with a web server
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In 1753 Samuel Johnson said: I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed. We're still nowhere. Sean is asking interesting questions about URI applications and local data access linking to a piece by Micah Dubinko. These days, I use mostly webservers to manage my files, having gone through a number of iterations using folders and ad-hoc scripts. The modus operandi of the last few years on a new machine has been to install Apache, running or backing the following: Python CGIs Wiki Subversion I also have public webspace set up with Python and a Wiki (I might get around to begging my provider for Subversion one day, but I'm not hopeful). This "stack" makes moving things around easy. Spidering into Lucene is imminent. So is RDF and TM metadata. Every folder I've ever created was ultimately an exercise in shoehorning descriptive metadata into folder names. It's not complicated . You don't need a fullblown setup to manage this and enter data. Apache can be configured to serve from a directory, which gives you web access without the drama of forms, POST or WebDAV. Just drag and drop files into the folder and you're done. Strangely for the office LAN scenario (zillions of spreadheets and word documents scattered on Windows shares), I find Linux+Samba easier to deal with Windows+WebDAV - anyway anyone using UNC names instead of URIs isn't going to know that's Fedora and not Win2k backing the share. Access control is a problem with any naive client machine running web servers. The upside of Apache is that if you're worried about access control, adding .htaccess files to a folder is straightforward. Here's an example of how this is useful. In Propylon we have a Redhat backed server called Nimoy that has an smb share mapped into Apache document space. Folks can drag and drop dependencies for any project into that share - jar files, databases, app servers. For example with a Java project we can zip up all the jars for the project and drag them into a folder on Nimoy. An ant file can pull down the dependency zip using the get task and unzip it into the project's lib/ folder, thus keeping the version control free of binary cruft, providing a single canonical place to hold jar files, letting people get started without downloading files from all over the net or having them emailed. [Yes, Maven can manage jar files using HTTP as well.] The next step is split the filesystem from file management. What do I mean? Well, over the years I've moved away from a place where I would think hard about how to file everything away - where what I could was predetermined by the file system at hand. I haven't be able or willing to do that for years - there's too much to classify and too many ways to classify it and I'm not paying myself to be a librarian. Then consider that folder based classification doesn't help with retrieval anyway unless you carry that classification scheme in your head all the time. This is an issue too with RDF. For me the chore of writing down RDF is not much better than making up the folder scheme de jure bunging things into them - well, ok, it's much better - virtualized, technology agnostic, platform agnostic, freeform metadata - but it's still a chore. No, RDF will have to be autogenerated as a side effect of doing useful work. Whatever; using http:// URIs and a web server is yards more flexible that using file:// URIs and filesystem. Now, I prefer a fire and forget mode, and to a large degree this is enabled by giving things URIs and putting them behind web servers. My thinking is that if I can get a file into HTTP space I'll do that. Everything else I've tried or seen was too complicated. I could imagine never classifying or sorting anything based on folders within a couple of years, preferring something like a Topic Map instead to tag the files with metadata - not that as I user I'd actually care how it's done. In 10 years time I'll be upset if I can't buy a computer that just lets me find things without having to think where I left them. WinFS seems to be going in this direction, we'll see what actually ships....
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