Zaphod progress - v0.02, the second generation is now live

Corion on 2006-10-17T20:08:36

I've made a major step forward in Zaphod development. The version 2 with much simpler change handling is now online. Not all features made it into the release - I skipped on some features in favour of actually releasing something. The features of the new release are:

1. Session support - more than one document can now be edited
2. Document paste - you can now paste a document for editing
3. Session autosave/recovery - if I restart the server, all sessions survive
4. Simplified representation of changes - the changes are now just triplets (offset, old, new), which makes handling and merging incredibly more easier in both, Perl and Javascript
5. Some tests, courtesy of JSAN

The features that didn't make it into this release:

1. Bookmarks in the document are there, but don't get updated properly when another user changes the document
2. Document download

But then, I'll have something for the next release. Now it's refactoring time to cut down the leftover code from the other incarnations, and look into frameworks to replace my own crufty code. Maybe this is a good situation to look at Catalyst on the Perl side and one of the JS libraries, like Prototype. On the other hand, Prototype is documented even less than my own hackery.

The source code is "out there", on my Perl repository, at least until I release it onto CPAN. It's free for the taking, as in "same terms as Perl".

This is the first code where I have my doubts about using an unrestrictive license because this code might actually be worth something for a business, but on the other hand, if somebody actually manages to turn this into a working business without me being involved, I'll be pretty amazed :)

Update: I think it will only work with IE6 and FireFox 1.0.x, or at least FireFox 1.5. If you want to help with porting it to other browsers, like Safari or whatnot, your help and patches are appreciated.