The recent lack of updates on Pimki is not because I'm not working on it, rather it's because I use my free time work on it and not blog about working on it :-)
So here's an update: After the user survey (yeah yeah I still haven't published the results), I come across the following conclusions: - Instiki is dead. It's unfortunate but it's a fact of life that its maintainers do not bother to respond to emails. - My users are techie, and are more concerned about the backend integrity than how to install it.
Despite the second point above, I think KirbyBase is better for Pimki. Even though it's not integrated into Rails, than say SQLite, it is still something I can better control and support. The ability to have a "just works" application is priceless. The couple of months of setback in dev time for Pimki have given me a much better understanding of ActiveRecord, and better options for my users. Pimki is now developed with both KirbyBase and SQLite is mind and is tested on both - You will have the simple life of plain text storage, or you can install and run it on any Rails' supported DB backend.
So for the last couple on months I have been working on Ackbar - An ActiveRecord KirbyBase Adapter. I have release the first experimental version last week, and am now giving it a good bashing. A few other people have expressed interest, including Jamey Cribbs the creator of KirbyBase. We have identified a few minor issues already, but overall it works pretty well.
So now I am back at full time Pimki. Since Instiki was actually holding up Pimki development, I am doing a full reimplementation. I will borrow code and inspiration from it, but will no longer be dependent / impacted by changes. I am now designing the data model that will best serve Pimki. It already includes a few enhancements I was planning on for some time.
The data model relationships are mostly done, and I now move to the actual model logic. This is probably the trickiest bit: decomposing a text section into data objects and components. It's very nice to have a section of prose with an embedded TODO item, but it's something else to process it flawlessly. The approach I am taking now is of decompose-on-save, i.e. the page will be processed as much as possible on creation / update and then saved/cahced as parts. The page will be reconstructed on display, and the cached bits may be used directly (static content like acronyms) or expanded (dynamic contents like page links to newly created pages or todo items which have been updated).
It looks like Pimki2 will center around stability and GTD features. I have a few more ideas up my sleeves around those areas, and already a growing list of ideas and requests for javascript based goodies which will be in Pimki 3.0.
So there you have it. I am back at full time (full hobby time that is :) on Pimki and I have absolute TONS of ideas on where to take this forward!
Previous Topic
