http://fusax.europe.webmatrixhosting.net/fusax/conclave.aspx - this is a test server is Russia that sometimes has a dodgy router between it and the EU.

'''What is Conclave?'''

First thing to make clear is that Conclave is a work in progress. It's not feature complete as it stands, and not likely to approach any level of completeness until Spring 2003.

Conclave is an experiment on the part of me (GuyMurphy) to see what common ground there is between WikiWikiWeb, TopicMaps, and WebLog concepts.

Wikis and blogs have been so massively popular that it's almost unthinkable for anybody with an interest in the Web to ignore them. What I am interested in is ways in which wikis and blogs can be made scalable and manageable, without losing that which makes them so effective.

'''What is Conclave not?'''

	*Conclave is not a WikiWikiWeb clone.
	*Conclave is not a TopicMaps implementation.
	*Conclave is not a WebLog tool.

	*Conclave is not Open Source

	 :	"...I don't know what Conclave is yet. This is an unresolved area that I will have to resolve sooner rather than later, as there is some very superficial commercial interest in Conclave. Conclave is likely to follow a model along the lines of free for non-commercial and individual use but with a commercial license for commercial usage." This is a quote from the web page. (jmd mdupont777@yahoo.com)

While Conclave is most definitely inspired by these three things, it is not a implementation of either of them. It will hopefully become a pragmatic fusion of the three.

'''k-log?'''

The term k-log is bandied about a lot on the Web.

	 :	A K-log is a knowledge-management weblog, where you use weblogging tools (like Blogger, Manila, or Radio) to write about your work, what happens, and what you know about. Presumably everybody else does too - or some reasonable portion of "everybody else". Then you might use RSS to aggregate all this content, and you have the core of a knowledge management system. -- PeterHarbeson

Conclave makes a stab in that territory. The old-style intranets failed... nobody uses them. We have to find new ways to address the needs of collaboration.

Last, Conclave is not a commercial venture. I'm happy to entertain any offers to implement Conclave on corporate intranets etc., but there's no company here, and Conclave isn't being punted.

'''Conclave's platform'''

More detail can be found in ConclaveDesign , but to give a brief rundown: Conclave is a DotNet application split into two primary parts, the ConclaveApplication and the ConclaveDataStore.

The platform choice is not out of any prejudice. I simply have DotNet, VisualStudio and SqlServer all handy, and they're nice and easy to work with. I will almost definitely port Conclave to Java in the future, and expect Java to serve perfectly well.

ConclaveApplication is implemented entirely using HttpModule and HttpRequestHandler, with no actual Asp.Net pages at all. This was this way for three reasons:

	*Vanity on my part.
	*Curiosity about a "clean" or "pure" Web application.
	*And because of a primary requirement for ease of deployment/installation.

I'm sick to my back teeth of Web applications that are a nightmare to deploy and maintain.

ConclaveDataStore is a TopicMaps based datastore that is entirely agnostic about the underlying datastore its sat on. I've implemented a similarly agnostic TopicMaps based store before that happily sat ontop of MySql, SqlServer and the filesystem. The first implementation, which is the one currently being used, is a SqlServer implementation, with the next one likely to be a filesystem.

'''Conclave's goals'''

For version null of Conclave I want a half decent Web tool that can be used as a wiki-like site, and a blog, that's easy to manage with large numbers of users and topics... like tens of thousands of topics.

I want documentation complete to the point where other developers aren't left with a murder mystery to solve if they wish to work with Conclave. And so that Conclave can be installed and up and running inside 15 minutes from consulting the initial readme.

Once these goals are reached, I'll start on version 2 which will be incremental rather than a revisional progression with the primary goal of allowing different Conclave installations to work together cooperatively as peers, with Conclave binding associations to topics in other domains, and notifying peers of changes to topics they're bound to.

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See WikiLikeThing
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CategoryDotNet