Sparrow
Sparrow is a document oriented web revision system written in Python; your work is the interface. It is 99.99% administrative debris free. You are free to use a variety of verbs on your nouns in an infinite number of ways.
Motivation
Distributed Revision Control in an incredibly useful tool for collaboration. The ability to easily merge, push, pull, and to have access to a full history of previous work is essential to the progress of a project. Tools like Git and Mercurial are such tools for developers.
Flexible schema, distributed, document-based database systems are an incredible useful form of storage. They give you the benifits of a database without the need to stay bound to a schema. Not only that but they give you revision control out of the box, are easier to distribute and can be embeddable into your application making the entire application not dependent on a database server. CouchDB and StrokeDB are two alpha software examples of such databases.
Being able to run a copy of a web application on our own hardware should not be underestimated. Not only does it provide many speed improvements for working with large files, but it can mean that our web application can integrate with our own desktop software.
There is a good percentage of our time that we spend away from the internet, in-fact getting some distance can be very refreshing. Being able to change your environment that may not have internet connection can free your mind and open creative doors that you may not have seen before. Being able to work offline is essential.
Distributable also means that collaboration can be done without the need for a centralized server. For a web revision system that potentially means you could run a website without a central host, but you would have access to those that are either around you or you know are online and working with.
Being able to directly edit your work without the need for a "backend" interface should not be glossed over. You should be able to make changes to the website without it appearing any different than it would appear to any other viewer. You can not seperate work from presentation without loosing important details that can only be expressed via the presentation. Our work and the commands we use should be strictly seperated and the verbs should only be visible when we need to access them. We should be free to use those verbs/actions wherever we need them.
Current Status
Sparrow is an experiment and missing many critical features. It initially started out as research project at the Art Center College of Design for alternative interfaces for Operating Systems. There is a lucid vision of where things can go. It's merely a peice of the puzzle. Much of this vision, and inspiration was learned by reading Jef Raskin's book, The Humane Interface. Aza Raskin and Humanized have another piece of the puzzle with Enso, and their upcoming user-interface research with Mozilla Labs. There are still however many other missing pieces. In fact I would be joyed if little Sparrow could be joined with such projects!
Sparrow is currently a Web Revision System, but it truly wants to grow up to be a real Peregrine Falcon of an Operating System!
There are not currently any websites flying on Sparrow, however they are in the making and will be available for viewing soon!
Roadmap
The first official release (one that is usable by people besides myself) will include many more features that it is currently operating with. Some future plans include:
- An improved, and discoverable interface. As well as a more thoughtful and rich interface for defining URL and Templates;
- Ability to define document types / models, however these should be schema-free so that detail distingtions can be made.
- Better web framework support; to include the features from Werkzeug, Django, in addition to CherryPy.
- Ability to work with various templating languages using something like Buffet.
- Video / Sound swf player, customizable using Python, and Ming and viewable in Gnash.
- A module interface for configuring Sparrow for various other uses.
- Rich text editing interface similar to Vim, or Emacs.
Dependencies
Among the many features Sparrow brings you, Sparrow currently depends on the features from: CherryPy, SQLAlchemy, Cheetah, jQuery, ImageMagick, Pygments...Download the Code
You can download it directly:
git clone http://braydon.com/sparrow note: may not work currently...
You can also browse via the Gitweb interface: http://git.braydon.com/?p=sparrow;a=summary
Sparrow is licenced with the Gnu GPL v3. You can hack away on it if your public hacking is contributed back to the community. This is essential to the growth of Sparrow from a small bird into blazing fast Peregrine Falcon!
Contacts
You can find me on the #sparrow channel on freenode (kubrick.freenode.net), or by joining our mailing list. http://sfdcenter.org/pipermail/sparrowAuthors
- Project Leader, and Developer: Braydon Fuller
- Contributors: Michaeljohn Clement, and Andreas Schuderer