Open Spaces

Scuttle Bookmarks is another extension to MediaWiki software and provides a key piece of functionality to achieve a single, integrated content repository. It is a twin extension to OMBookmarks, which I have released a couple of weeks earlier. While OM Bookmarks is focused on retrieving and displaying bookmarks from the Open Methodology Bookmarks website (which is part of the MIKE2.0 collaborative environment) in your MediaWiki installation, Scuttle Bookmarks allows you to do the same but from a local installation of Scuttle.

The two extensions also follow two different architectural design patterns. The Scuttle Bookmarks extension is designed to be installed in the same domain (or server) which is hosting both your MediaWiki site and your Scuttle site. The extension uses client side JavaScript calls to query the Scuttle site for relevant bookmarks and then displays the result on the MediaWiki article page.

The OM Bookmarks extension will always be installed in domain different from the Openmethodology.org website which is hosting OM Bookmarks. If it were to follow the same architecture as Scuttle Bookmarks, a user would access his MediaWiki site (e.g. www.mycollaborationsite.com), which would provide a JavaScript that retrieves information from a third party (i.e.openmethodology.org). Sounds like malicious code, doesn’t it? This is called cross-domain scripting and is blocked by default by most modern browsers. Therefore, this extension was implemented with a server side http call which performs all the magic. And the user only sees the final result.

You might ask yourself now why all the fuss about JavaScript when the server side http call could be used for both extensions? Well, the simple answer is that part of us creating and improving the MIKE2.0 collaboration site, is to develop an open source software based solution to deliver enterprise 2.0 collaboration to customers. And JavaScript http and PHP http are just two more guns we now have in our toolkit that we can offer clients.