Version 0.0.27 released

Version 0.0.27 introduces support for hosting the server-side components on Linux (specifically Ubuntu 9.10). Up till now Remote Writer has used the wxJavascript library, which is actively maintained by Franky Braum, who is migrating the code to a new library called GLUEscript.

However, although Franky’s intention is to support Linux platforms as well as Windows, at the moment the code is not quite there, and I’m unable to get it to compile under Ubuntu. Therefore, I’ve decided, at least as an interim measure, to continue using wxJavascript for Windows installs, and a different library, JSEXT, for Linux installs.

I’d much rather use a single server-side javascript library for both Windows and Linux, but there you go — I’m hoping that GLUEscript will evolve nicely so that it meets this need, but for the time being JSEXT is being used for Linux.

There’s a few minor bug-fixes as well (check the change log).

Version 0.0.26 released

Version 0.0.26 incorporates a major update to the TinyMCE editor, from version 2.1.3 to version 3.2.1.1. A minor release in terms of direct functionality for Remote Writer (although the use of the newer version of TinyMCE offers efficiency and functionality improvements itself), but a reasonably major release in terms of changes to the code base.

Version 0.0.25 released

Version 0.0.25 includes a number of important bug fixes and useful features, including:

• Addition of two simple scripts to aid debugging of wxjs.
• Corrected help notes to reflect recent changes in wxjs.
• Included new version of json library, which is better at parsing long strings using regExps

APREQ2_ReadLimit

I discovered, as a result of not getting any reasonably lengthy piece of content synchronised back to the server, that there was a message in the apache log alluding to me trying to send a POST message of more than 1024 characters.

It turns out that this is controlled by a variable in the apache conf file, so as a result of the recent wxjs upgrade, the wxjs stuff in the conf file now needs to look like

LoadModule wxjs_module "d:/wxjs/bin/mod_wxjs.dll"
AddHandler wxjs .wxjs
wxJS_Modules "d:/wxjs/bin/modules.js"
wxJS_RtSize 1M
wxJS_CtxSize 8K
APREQ2_ReadLimit 100000K


I.e. APREQ2_ReadLimit has to be set to be some reasonably sane value large enough to represent your largest expected POST message size (i.e. when synchronising content to the server).
If not, you’ll get an OK response from the call, but the content won’t be synchronised, and you’ll only know for sure that there’s a problem by seeing the message in the log file.

New version of wxjs

I’ve only recently realised that Franky Braem has released a new version of the wxJavascript Library, which now has been compiled against version 2.2.6 of Apache, for those who don’t want to compile Apache from source.

This has also meant some changes to the help notes, particularly

• Installing server-side functionality
• What do I do if it doesn’t work after installation

As a result, I’ve created a couple of simple javascript files for use in testing that the wxJavascript library is working correctly:

• server\wxjs test_cmd.wxjs
• server\wxjs test_html.wxjs

Version 0.0.24 released

Version 0.0.24 includes a number of important bug fixes and useful features, including:

• Fixed synchronisation bugs which caused files to not be fully synchronised between the client and the server
• Added the ability for the user to rename a document
• Added the ability for the user to delete a document (virtual delete)
• Added the ability to add id attributes to elements with a class attribute beginning “name”. Although this sounds a bit esoteric, it means that it is now possible to add unique ids to all elements representing authorities (e.g. “namePersonal”, “nameOrganisation” etc) before exporting the content from Remote Writer, and these ids can be maintained when the authority is then matched to an external authority file. Thus, when a future export from Remote Writer is performed, the newly exported results can be compared to the previously matched results, and be updated with the matched information (by a user script), thus preventing having to manually rematch the authorities against the external authority file. Any new authorities added in Remote Writer since the previous export must of course still be matched to the external authority file.

Remote Writer Screencast

Here’s a screencast of some of Remote Writer’s features, demonstrating how to create and style documents, compare revisions etc. Hopefully this’ll provide people with a better idea of what Remote Writer is and how it works before installing it.

Version 0.0.23 released

Version 0.0.22 includes several minor changes, most notably ensuring that all changes are synchronised to and from the server when the user logs out.

This means that, in order to guarantee that all changes have been synchronised with the server, the user should log out at the end of a session, rather than using the “remember me on this computer” feature.

Version 0.0.22 released

Version 0.0.22 includes several minor changes, including:

• A dialogue to prompt the user to save when starting to edit a new (unnamed) document
• Changed configuration file linebreaks to be windows-compatible, to allow easier editing
• Help notes about problems encountered during installation
• Help notes regarding the compatibility of wxJavascript

How to get wxJavaScript and Apache to play together nicely

There’s a note on the help page, under the section Installing server-side functionality that states:

Depending on your requirements, you may need to compile the mod_wxjs source.

What this really means is that the version of mod_wxjs supplied in the Remote Writer download is compiled against a certain version of Apache server, and that if you install a different version of Apache (say, by installing the most current version from the Apache site), mod_wxjs will therefore need to be recompiled against this newer version of Apache.

In version 0.0.20 of Remote Writer, the version of Apache that mod_wxjs is compiled against is 2.2.3, therefore if you don’t want to go to the hassle of recompiling mod_wxjs, then simply install this Apache 2.2.3 version from the Apache archive (if working on windows, you’ll want one of these binaries).

Remote Writer unleashed!

Remote Writer is now released to the world.

“What is Remote Writer?” I hear you say. Remote Writer is a browser-based word processor offering users the following features, amongst others:

• The ability to create XHTML content using an intuitive WYSIWYG interface
• The ability to collaborate on documents with other authors
• The ability to work on documents from different computers in different locations
• Persistence of documents both on the client and on the server
• The ability to work with documents while either online or offline
• The ability to use customised block-level and inline styles
• The ability to compare the changes between two different revisions of a given document
• The ability to revert to a previously-saved version of a document
• Administration functions to allow for creation and maintenance of author accounts
• Secure access to documents, and the ability to encrypt content during transfer between server and client
• An implementation that is based on standard and freely-available web technologies.

If you’d been reading the above list closely, you might have found the fifth point intriguing. Remote Writer makes use of Google Gears to provide offline creation and maintenance of documents. You can take your laptop to the beach or on an airplane, and still be able to work on your documents using your web browser.

Is this a new thing? Well, so far, you can use a browser-based word processor online (such as Google Docs) and the folks at Zoho Writer have even integrated Google Gears with their product to allow you to work both online and offline with your documents. However, as far as I know, Remote Writer is the first open-source browser-based word processor with online / offline functionality.

Why is this important? Well, a significant short-coming of Google Docs, marvelous as it is, is that you cannot define your own custom styles. You may have a need to create content where you want to style or indicate the semantic importance of certain bits of text, and of course your requirements could be very different to the requirements of other people.

With Remote Writer, you can define your own inline and block-level styles (and the CSS to render these styles), and then see the results graphically as you edit your documents.

The genesis of Remote Writer was a need to allow non-technical users (i.e. those who are not comfortable with markup languages like TEI XML) a means of creating content using a WYSIWYG editor, but where they could style certain parts of their documents to indicate semantic information such as the names of people mentioned in the document. A related need was the ability to then take this content and add further markup to it (such as authority key information for the people mentioned in the document), and then allow the user to continue editing the document. Therefore, collaboration is an important feature of Remote Writer.

I should mention that the work I’ve done in putting Remote Writer together has been made easier by many orders of magnitude by the work done by the developers at Moxiecode Systems on TinyMCE and the developers responsible for SQLite, and by the work of Franky Braem on the wxJavascript library. Without the efforts of these people (and of course those behind Google Gears) Remote Writer would simply not be possible.

For more information on what Remote Writer can do, and how to install and use it, please see the help page.