Technical information on Infoweb

Open (and free) source

Hand in hand with the wide-spreading of the internet, is the concept of open source. You may or may not have heard of it (probably the former), but this is not the right forum to discuss the fenomena in general. For those interested in this somewhat revolutionary software production model, closer inspection of the operating system linux, itself a true open source project, and maybe the biggest advocate of open source as far as the public opinion is concerned.

The Infoweb documentation system is created by open source software products and relies on open source programs and products in all levels. In some sort of acknowledgement, we have made Infoweb open source, too. We will offer a proper distribution model in time, until then the source code can only be accessed through CVS. Please feel free to contact the developers if you are curious and want a peek at the source code of Infoweb.

Technologies that run the Infoweb

php/apache

php and the apache webserver complete each other in an unsupersedable way, allthough they are totally separate projects.

The Infoweb web server is an apache webserver, and a fairly recent copy of php provides all web dynamics.

Python

Python has quickly become a popular tool, much thanks to the growth of the Internet, but also due to its intuitive programming approach. It is an object oriented script language, and one of its distinctive treats is its strict requirements to the formatting of the program code.

All command line utilities, as well as the programs that are run through the e-mail interface are written in Python.

xml

The format of the Infoweb articles is xml and a whole new dtd has been created, which all articles has to conform to. [infoweb.dtd].

For web presentation, we use the internal xml and domxml extensions of php. For command line tools and xml validation we use xmlproc (Python) and rxp.

xsl/t

xsl/t is a part of all the tools that together complete the xml framework, and makes it possible to transfom xml markup to a different xml markup, to html markup or to plain text, based on certain rules.

The Infoweb project employs xsl/t to transform articles (written in xml) to a format suitable for web (html). The xsl/t processor in use is called "Sablotron" and is developed by Gingerall, and has a php extension.

mysql

mysql is a small and efficient RDBMS database, developed by swedes at TcX AB.

We store the articles in a mysql database, and retrieve them by the use of the mysql functions in php and the python-mysql module for python.

miscellany

Both our development and production computers are run by SUSE GNU/linux. Programmering is mainly done using Emacs, where we use major-modes for php, python, xml, xslt and dtds. We also use an in-house developed Infoweb major mode. To control our development and maintain our source code, we use cvs extensively, and ViewCVS is a really neat tool to partner cvs. For internationalisation (currently translation between English and Norwegian only), GNU gettext is invaluable, and a super tool to go with it is KBabel.

further information

Please do contact us if you have questions or inquiries about the Infoweb project, we will be more than happy to answer all your questions.