Hosting Infrastructure

THe aim of a future hosting infrastructure for Fedwiki Server software should separate concerns:

It should be possible to place basic Fedwiki pages (whether as JSON or HTML), and serve them via a Restful Http interface.

Any generic server software should be able to provide access to the information by serving the JSON/HTML5 files, while servers that provided additional Rest functionailty would allow authenticated users the ability to write.

The client would package both concerns, enabling the user to read and write to Fedwiki pages. The server would enforce whether they had the capability and authorised access to write information.

As an initial start at documenting a minimal server speicification we have made a start at creating a RESTful Fedwiki Server as an endpoint for both the existing Fedwiki Client and newer Native Clients.

It would be useful if the ability to view pages (that is render the Fedwiki Page Markup to HTML5, was separated out into a service or library, so that external site could easily incorporate content from the federation - even it was not a Fedwiki site. One easy way to do this would be to simply support oEmbed.

However a more generous approach would be to enable the rendering of arbitrary Fedwiki content into HTML5. This would be similar to the MediaWiki Api's ability to render Mediawiki Template Tags.

The first regards an idea for a couple of plugins that we should make that enable anyone to hook RESTful web services into Fedwiki to create items (paragraphs) or new Fedwiki Pages.

The second is about how the hosting should be configured to allow easy deployment of these services. both are just sketches of ideas, to be discussed before turning into an initial draft specification.