[SoC] Project Proposal - Pier

[Keith Hodges]

OWTRTA - One Wiki to Rule Them All.

Project Outline:
Develop a wiki translation engine using Pier, enabling Pier to routinely 
read and write other wiki formats. Using a configuration of Pier with 
the OODBMS Magma as a back end, test and explore scalability issues with 
the goal of importing wikipedia. The ability to have a full text search 
of the persisted data is required.

Technical details:
Pier is a wiki engine designed explicitly to be extensible and scalable. 
Unlike the majority of wiki implementations Pier has a very clean design 
which uses a number of classic design patterns. Wiki formatted content 
is read using a parser into its internal object-model representation, 
the parser is generated from a parser compiler.

Benefits to the Student:
This project will be beneficial to any Computer Science student, 
reflecting much of what they will have been taught. It will providing a 
learning opportunity through exposure to the full, clean, source code of 
every facet of these particular technologies, which represent the best 
of their class, in terms of their design. For example, as a starting 
point the student will begin by learning how to use a compiler-compiler 
as a parser generator.

Benefits to the community:
A large amount of information is being held in legacy wiki's, within the 
squeak community alone wiki.squeak.org has over 5000 pages. Pier needs 
some enhancements before it is ready to take up the mantel.
Magma is a relatively new OODBMS, which is beginning to be used in some 
commercial environments and these would benefit greatly from the 
scalability testing involved in this project.

hows that for a first draft?

Keith

		
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