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Sider - 0.5 Technology Preview

Goals

• Support essential features (types, views, view components) by the platform
• Demonstrate idea of extensible platform for managing information. Packages (extensions) will be there only to show things like separation of concerns (through types, views and views components), type inheritance, multiply views to work with document, etc.

Example

Platform

Known issues

• Sider is a little slow and can eat a lot of memory (it gets to 100MB mark quickly)
• Document source dialog inside a view doesn't resize with the window
• Only document in the current tab is resized with the Sider window when several documents are open

Features

• Dynamic extensions: Sider parses extensions on start up to support different data types. Each extension is either type (describe data structure and logic to work with it), view (used to show documents), or view components (to help views reuse code).
• Browser-based views: Sider embeds browser to show views (each view is a transformation to generate HTML based on the document XML). To assist with view development JavaScript objects are available to communicate with Sider and document types. Each type provides logic to work with the document, so all views focus only on showing the document and handling user interaction.
• Multiple views: Each type can have an unlimited number of views. When document of that type is opened user can chose any view to work with the document.
• Store information in a natural form: Types can inherit from or compose other types to reuse existing logic to work with data structure. It is possible to combine abstract tree type with HTML type to get a tree of HTML pages, or an abstract list with a movie/game/book type to get collection of movies/games/books. The basic idea is that all information is a combination of simple, atomic data types organized in a structure (tree, list, table, graph, and that's about it). Sider makes it possible to separate description and logic into small pieces and then combine different pieces to get new, useful types. This concept is very similar to object-oriented programming.
• Extension versioning: Types and views improvements can break compatibility with existing documents/extensions. To solve this problem all Sider extensions support versioning. All references (including type inheritance) can specify either specific extension version or a range of versions.

Packages

• Abstract types: Abstract tree and HTML. Notes packages uses them to demonstrate types reuse (through inheritance, composition, etc.) Both types are self contained and future packages will rely on them.
• Notes: Organizes HTML documents in a tree structure. Each note is in HTML, with WYSIWYG editor to edit it. There will be several views to edit notes, browse through them or quickly enter new notes. The goal is to demonstrate several views to work with the document, each designed for different tasks.

Credits