MindTouch Deki

MindTouch Deki

MindTouch Deki logo
File:MindTouch Deki screenshot.png A sample instance of MindTouch Deki using the Fiesta theme.
Developer(s)	MindTouch, Inc Community contributors
Initial release	25 July 2006
Stable release	9.02.2 / May 27, 2009
Written in	PHP, C#
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	Many, translatable online
Type	Wiki
License	GNU General Public License, Apache License
Website	http://developer.mindtouch.com/Deki (Open source edition) http://wiki.mindtouch.com/Products (Commercial edition)

MindTouch Deki is a web-based collaboration, wiki software and mashup platform. It is divided into a front-end (written in PHP) and an API, written in C#. The Deki front-end and API are distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License while the Dream services layer is released under the Apache License, making it free and open source software.

MindTouch packages some proprietary connectors on top of the open source edition to provide a commercial version of Deki, currently branded 'MindTouch 2009', which is commercially supported.

As of 5 February 2009, Deki was the 2nd-ranked project on the open source hosting site SourceForge, where it was Project of the Month in May 2008.

History

MindTouch originally developed Deki as a fork of MediaWiki, replacing wikitext with XHTML, adding a WYSIWYG editor, adding page and file search using Lucene, adding page hierarchies, and wrapping it all in a new UI.

For the "Hayes" release in July 2007, the backend was completely reimplemented in C#, resulting in an API built as web services on top of the new Dream server and toolset.

The most recent major release, "Lyons" (release in March 2009), and the associated commercial version MindTouch 2009 , introduces push notifications on content change, key/value properties on page, user and file objects, and the "JEM" (Javascript Events & Messages) framework, which provides event coordination and message passing. JEM integrates with the jQuery library and PageBus, a JavaScript event and message bus, to build rich internet applications.

Architecture

Deki API

Deki differs from other wikis by decoupling the frontend and the business logic. The web frontend interacts with the services via a REST API. This separation means that users can easily interact with the wiki in any language of their choice, using a web services architecture. The Deki API is commonly deployed, and fully supported on Linux using Mono, as well as Windows on the .NET framework.

Each wiki page is automatically exposed as an XML Web Service, which can be operated on using standard HTTP verbs.

Dream Technology

The Deki API is built on a service layer called Dream (Distributed REST Application Manager), a REST framework for building web services on the .NET platform. .

Web front-end

The most common interface to the Deki API is its PHP frontend. This frontend provides users with a full-featured wiki, built using a WYSIWYG editor.

Other front-ends

Other frontends to the Deki API available in the form of "connectors"; a Desktop Connector allows publishing from Microsoft Windows, while an Outlook Connector allows publishing of documents from Microsoft Outlook. A plugin for Microsoft Word is under development.

An open-source iPhone interface named DekiMobile was released in November 2008.

Key features

Content authoring

All information in Deki pages is stored as XML, rather than wikitext. Pages are edited using a GUI editor, and can be manipulated as an XML web service. The frontend supports embedding rich media and has a built-in image gallery.

Deki supports internal and external authentications . Permissions can be applied to individual pages or page hierarchies.

DekiScript

MindTouch Deki includes a complete scripting language, called DekiScript. DekiScript, a light-weight, interpreted programming language, allows users to add dynamic content to wiki pages. It can be embedded directly into wiki pages or used in XML extensions.

Example

DekiScript is inserted using double curly braces. Hello World can be written easily:

{{ 'Hello World' }}

Dynamic content can be added using DekiScript functions this example will display the name of the current user, and the text of the current day (e.g. Wednesday):

Hi {{ User.Name }}, it's {{ Date.DayName(Date.Now) }}.

Web 2.0 & mashups

A primary benefit of MindTouch Deki is the ability to use DekiScript to perform mashups. The open source edition of Deki ships with extensions allowing connection to over 100 web services, including systems such as Dapper, Flickr, Google Maps, Windows Live and Yahoo.

A commercial license enables features such as connectors to SugarCRM, Salesforce, LinkedIn, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access.

LinuxInsider describes this feature as "let[ting] site admins rope in applications -- legacy systems, CRM and ERP apps, databases and Web 2.0 tools -- and hand them over to business users to create mashups, templates, dynamic reports and dashboards."

Multi-language

Multi-language support (named polyglot by MindTouch) allows hosting content in multiple languages on a single site. Language can be specified by user, site, section and pages, adapting the UI to the specified language. Search is available across all languages and results are prioritized by the user’s default language. . MindTouch cite the 8.05 release of Deki as the first polyglot application on the web.

Deployment

Deki is available as a package for Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, and SUSE, in both open source and commercial editions. The source code is available for each release on Sourceforge, and a public SVN repository is available.

Users of the Commercial edition are also offered a Windows Installer (.MSI) package.

A popular deployment option is a VMware virtual machine; the VMware appliance is certified..

MindTouch offer free wiki hosting at http://wik.is/, under the brand "MindTouch Deki Express". wik.is is hosted on Amazon EC2 . Basic hosting, with 50mb of storage, is free; upgrading to "Pro" for $99/year gives a user 1GB of storage, plus the ability to embed custom HTML (such as Google AdSense advertising) and use a custom domain name of their choice.

Public deployments

One of the highest profile deployments of Deki is at Mozilla's developer wiki, where over 25,000 pages were migrated from MediaWiki to Deki.. Deki also powers WhoRunsGov.com, a community site launched in January 2009 by the Washington Post.