« OSX and NFS issues | Main | Dissertation framework »

February 04, 2008

Choosing framework for my dissertation

Though my dissertation was just moved from May to September, I neww desperately to decide on the framework for which the material will be presented in. I want all my work (texts, music, videos, software demos) to be contained on a DVD and accessible in a non-linear, inter-linked and searchable fashion. These are my design considerations:

  • The repository must...
    • ...run in a standard web browser (possibly limited to Firefox).
    • ...be accessible off-line.
    • ...only rely on open formats.
    • ...require a minimal install effort on the part of the user,
  • It would be nice if...
    • ...it could be syncable with an on-line server.
    • ...it allowed for basic local persistent changes (comments, mark-as-read, etc)
Offline RIAs (which is basically what I want) is a hot potato these days with initiatives such as Firefox 3, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Air and Google Gears. But rather than relying on a large external framework such as these I would prefer to have something simple that is entirely embeddable.

I have found two solutions that may work for me:

  1. Junction - a part of Google Gears and designed to be a JavaScript only version of Ruby on Rails.
  2. Embedding Apache Derby in a Java Applet and letting JavaScript retrieve content and insert it in the HTML similar to this demo.
I'm leaning towards the second solution and I'm working on a proof-of-concept. My concerns are how to deal with the local storage and the installation and signature of the applet.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Posted by henrikfr at February 4, 2008 02:32 PM

Comments

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?

(You may use HTML tags for style)