Conzilla and Collaborilla go REST

I just released Conzilla 2.2.2 together with Collaborilla 1.1. The biggest improvement of these versions is the switch to RESTful web services, which makes it finally possible to access Collaborilla even in very restrictive networks – the new services use standard HTTP port 80 which shouldn’t be a problem anymore. To make the picture complete, I also added support for HTTP proxies, so there is no excuse anymore for not being able to use Conzilla.

The noteworthy changes since version 2.2.1:

• Support for Collaborilla 1.1 and the new RESTful web services
• Support for connections through HTTP proxies
• Possibility to conditionally empty the disk caches
• Fix for problem on MacOS which prevented to open URLs in web browsers
• Fixed some NullPointerExceptions

Go and get it. Or if you already have an older version: just launch it via Java Web Start, the upgrade should then take place automatically.

WebDAV library Jakarta Slide discontinued

The Apache Jakarta subproject Slide does not exist anymore. After several years of bugfixing only, the project has been stopped and recommends to switch over to other libraries like Jackrabbit.

I introduced Slide a while ago to Conzilla for accessing the WebDAV/SVN data store used by the Collaborilla collaboration server. I was not very happy with the spartan info I got out of some exceptions (some messages were just “null”), the documentation was a bit holey as well. At that time I thought of using Jackrabbit, not just as a WebDAV-client, but as a complete replacement for the LDAP/WebDAV/SVN combination. I like the concept of a real content repository, and that’s exactly what Jackrabbit is: an open source reference implementation of JCR 170.

The next release of Collaborilla will contain major changes, I think it will even be an almost complete rewrite. I don’t know yet whether the backend will be a traditional DBMS or a content repository, but I already know which library is not going to be used anymore.

Conzilla 2.1 released

We just released our concept browser Conzilla in version 2.1 together with our collaboration server Collaborilla 1.0. Both applications are open source and have been licensed under the GPL.

The biggest changes from the last version (2.0) are:

• Support for collaborative conceptual modeling (publication of and contribution to context-maps), supported by the collaboration server Collaborilla.
• Support for Dialogue Mapping.
• Java Web Start support for easy installation and maintenance.
• Refurbished user interface and usability improvements.
• Export of context-maps to the formats SVG, PNG and JPEG.
• Bookmarking functionality.
• Improved layer management.
• Color theme support.

Conzilla 2.1 requires a Java Runtime Environment in version 1.4.2 or newer.

Paper accepted: Collaborative Construction of Artifacts

Our paper “Collaborative Construction of Artifacts” got accepted at the 4th Conference on Professional Knowledge Management “Experiences and Visions”. We are going to present it at the Workshop for Collaborative Knowledge Management (CoKM2007).

Reference
Ebner, H., Palmér, M., Naeve, A., (2007), Collaborative Construction of Artifacts, Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Professional Knowledge Management, Workshop Collaborative Knowledge Management (CoKM2007), Potsdam, Germany, 28-30 March 2007.