[twdev] Tiddlywiki + MS-Access

[lapin]

Good Evening Everybody,

My question might sound silly to some but has anybody thought about
using MS-Access as back-end database?

Regards,

Pascal

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[PMario]

Hi,
What could be the advantage?
-m

[lapin]

Hello PMario,

One of the ideas behind Tiddlywiki is to be portable and all
inclusive, free of any link to a server. It is a matter of opinion but
Access pretty much is the same (at least to me) to anyone who doesn't
(care to) know how to code in PHP/MySQL. Combining the two seems
interesting to me if only for the mere pleasure of adding a
supplementary feature to Tiddlywiki.

Like I wrote earlier it's a silly idea but it crossed my mind
yesterday as I was developing a tool on Access. It's meant to be only
temporary until our IT department is able to deliver us with a more
sophisticated solution. I just thought it would be great to actually
give colleagues something that would look nice, work well and maybe
trigger their interest in using wikis.

Pascal

[Måns]

Hi Pascal

>      One of the ideas behind Tiddlywiki is to be portable and all
> inclusive, free of any link to a server. It is a matter of opinion but
> Access pretty much is the same (at least to me) to anyone who doesn't
> (care to) know how to code in PHP/MySQL. Combining the two seems
> interesting to me if only for the mere pleasure of adding a
> supplementary feature to Tiddlywiki.

To me portability is a variety of things - OS'independance - Windows,
Mac and Linux agnosticism, Open Source - freedom to "port" install
anywhere you like, Online, offline, on a friends maschine, on a
separate disc - on your own server, etc etc...
ools
Microsoft doesn't deliver any of these "portabilities" - however Open
Office does.
I would be very happy to see some kind of plugin which delivers closer
interoperation, either as backend ie WriterTools for Open Office,
TiddlyWikiPlugin for OpenOffice or even a frontend for Open Office
Database (Base)....
Open Office exists as a portable package, which you can download from
portableapps.com (if you'd like to investigate without installing in
Windows).

Please don't get me wrong - I work with proprietary software every day
(profesionally)- however TiddlyWiki is a an opensource project which
give you freedom to be creative even down to its sourcecode, why
invest good work and time on delivering a frontend for proprietary
software, which won't give you anything back?? - I don't get it?...

I hope my lack of enthusiasm for a MS-plugin-project hasn't made you
give up making a good wikiexperience for your collegues, I just wanted
to point out that I think that TidddlyWiki, and the TiddlyWiki
community should strive for communication with other open source
projects and open standards... MS people get paid for keeping the good
ideas to themselves, We "payback" to eachother with good ideas ...
Working with a local database as a backend IS a good idea - helping MS
to earn more money is not! Open Office is Open Source... Get my point?

Best wishes
Måns Mårtensson

[Mark S.]

I believe if you do a google search, someone out there has worked out
a javascript/ODBC workaround. That would probably be a first step in
making an Access/TW interface. Or connecting to the open office
database, for that matter.

What "Access" would do for you is to enhance scalability. Depending on
your your machine's capabilities, you will sooner or later hit size
limitations. When we're talking about portability, OS isn't always the
issue. A large TW might work fine on a desktop machine, but choke on a
netbook.

A more universal solution might be a plugin based on sqlite. FF
already uses sqlite, so it must be possible, at least in theory to
access sqlite from javascript. I suppose the first step would be to
find out if someone has already made a FF plugin that would allow
sqlite to be accessed from within javascript.

Mark

[lapin]

The SQLite suggestion seems like a good idea. Thanks Mark.
Pascal

[Anthony Muscio]

My Moneys worth,

I would support the idea of using an open database as per Mans and the original idea suggested by Pascal.

Of course the best idea would be a layered approach where you can swap the underlying storage system (use as the data store) and import export and dynamically load from it.

Lots of existing server side work has been done. This suggestion is just another back-end case.

One advantage is the tools and integration, alternate databases would bring to Tiddly wiki. Imagin if Open office base + MS Access and even MS SQL and Oracle could host the back-end. As long as the ability to generate a portable tiddlywki is retained there is great strength in this. TiddlyWiki could become the "data access" portal of choice.

We must always remember how quickly things advance. at the moment 10's of megabytes seems big for our tiddlywiki's browser and 32GB USB drives - what about 5 years ?

Perhaps tiddlywiki5 is the the best place for these ideas.

TonyM

If you have not found an easy way to do it with TiddlyWiki, you have missed something.
www.tiddlywiki.com

[FND]

Accessing databases directly from TiddlyWiki (i.e. JavaScript) is likely
gonna be tricky. At the very least, it will require some special module
to expose the respective functionality to JavaScript (e.g. a browser
extension, or a server providing an HTTP API).

> Of course the best idea would be a layered approach where you can swap
> the underlying storage system (use as the data store) and import export
> and dynamically load from it.

FWIW, that's pretty much how TiddlyWeb works. Its SQL store uses a
generic wrapper (SQLAlchemy) which supports a variety of database engines:
http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/reference/dialects/index.html
http://www.sqlalchemy.org/trac/wiki/DatabaseNotes#MicrosoftAccess

So both OpenOffice and MS Access could be used to view data held in a
database managed by TiddlyWeb.


-- F.