WaaS : Wiki as a Service
André Filipe Monteiro Lamelas da Silva · 2008
A wiki is a webpage that can be edited by any authorized user, written in a pre-defined language that is afterwards converted in HTML. Although simple, the implications of this concept on the web technologies we have nowadays are enormous. We assisted through the last years to a paradigm shift concerning the World Wide Web contents. Before, the contents were there, produced by someone whose function was exactly to produce those contents; today, on the so called Web2.0, the contents are also created by us. To allow those content creation functionalities to be accessible to everyone it is necessary to do a progressive simplification of the web content creation tools. This is the scope where usability requirements appear, being nowadays fundamental on the web applications development. On this paper it’s described the development process of the Gruki application, a wiki built with the purpose of allowing the easy creation of contents for by everybody, for everybody. The WYSIWYG web content editor Wedit, built around the usability, allows Gruki to acquire to itself that simplicity and ease of use. Gruki also wants to simplify the use of wikis by allowing the the creation of a wiki using just a simple register form. Each wiki on Gruki will be called a space, being each space associated with a group of pages that share a certain set of permissions. Each space has also a group of associated users that have special privileges in the space. To allow an agilization of the Gruki development process and with the objective of exploring the agile methods of software development, the framework Ruby on Rails is going to be used. This is a framework for web applications development and it’s highly oriented for the agile methods of software development. This methods are based in a philosophy that states that software development should be and agile and iterative process, making it able to adapt easily to change. This way, this project not only will allow learning on the agile methodologies of software development but will also result in a web application with high value for collaborative information sharing motivated by it’s wiki nature.