Re: [tinyTiM-discuss] Connecting tinyTiM with TMShare

[Lars H. <he...@se...>]

[...]
>> All i found about TMShare was an old paper from Kal [1]. Is it a
>> product from networkedplanet or some standard? if its not a standard,
>> we might leave it as a feature request.

It's not a standard, though. It's a protocol based on Atom. Anyway,
the spec is freely available and it is better than nothing. :) The
basic idea was that tinyTiM utilises the snapshots from the server.
The provided fragments will be ignored at least in the initial
version. tinyTiM would contact the server, look for the available
topic maps and download the topic map on request transparently for the
user. The next version could also consider the fragments. I.e.
download all fragments which are published later that the latest
snapshot.

There is also TMRAP but it has slightly other goals. I.e. downloading
a complete map is not possible with TMRAP. TMRAP can be used to ask
a server if it has information about a particular topic, for example.

Implementing a TopicMapSystem for TMShare shouldn't be too hard. The
system would establish a connection to the server, parse the overview
page and use the provided topic maps as initial set of locators
returned by TopicMapSystem.getLocators(). Once the user uses
TopciMapSystem.getTopicMap(Locator), the system downloads the latest
snapshot, deserializes it and returns the topic map. Or the system
download the topic maps in a background task after it has been
initialized.

The TMShareTopicMapSystem would be a bit heavier than the ordinary
TopicMapSystem, so it should be implemented as a tinyTiM subproject.
Further, the TMShareTopicMapSystem would introduce a dependency to a
deserializer package (i.e. tinytim-mio) and may introduce more
dependencies, i.e. to Restlet [1] or to the HTTPClient [2]. Maybe it
can be implemented with the standard Java libs (URLConnection and
friends).

Anyway, that's the rough idea.

[1] <http://www.restlet.org/>
[2] <http://hc.apache.org/>


Best regards,
Lars
-- 
Semagia 
<http://www.semagia.com>