A wiki is a collaborative editing platform, allowing many to cooperate in writing a website.
However, the term has been extended to mean anything that can be edited from the web with minimal effort, and making page creation extremely easy. That's exactly what jsw is.
Usually, wikis allow users to edit the source files and then it's sent to the servers so that they can generate HTML markup from the Wiki markup, and back to the browser for preview.
Often, HTML pages are generated on-the-fly from source. Sometimes they are cached, so that the computation doesn't need to occur everytime. But most importantly, it's usually the server that does the markup translation. jsw is different.
jsw is a client-side wiki, which means the HTML generation occurs in your browser, while you type. Not only does this allow instant preview, it also means that your website is now a simple collection of static HTML files, that you can drop on any web space.
In addition, all uploads are done on the background, it feels like a native text editor thanks to HTML5 + JavaScript, and uses extended Markdown by default, which is a human-friendly markup language.
Well yes. Since the end result is just static pages, you can't do dynamic stuff like printing the date or fancy database stuf. But who does wants that in a wiki anyway?
AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING, JSW'S SECURITY IS EQUIVALENT TO SWISS CHEESE GONE THROUGH AN INDUSTRIAL MIXER. IF SOMEONE DECIDES TO SNIFF YOUR CONNECTION TO RETRIEVE YOUR FTP IDENTIFIERS, YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN. I WILL ASSUME NO RESPONSIBILITIES FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED BY YOUR USE OF JSW. I HOPE THAT'S CLEAR.
For the admin frontend, just serve the project's directory with Apache or nginx, and configure URL rewriting so that every subpath is served via index.htm
Here's a sample nginx configuration that works well for me:
location / { root html; index index.html index.htm;
rewrite ^/admin/(.*)$ /jsw-frontend/index.htm break;
}
A similar Apache configuration can be obtained via a .htaccess and mod_rewrite
For the user frontend, here's a sample .htaccess used to serve pages without .htm:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.htm -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.htm
A similar nginx configuration can be used
For the backend, if you want to run it locally, just launch ruby app.rb - it
will listen on http://localhost:4567/ by default.
If you want to deploy it on Heroku (they have free hostings that are more than
enough for a jsw backend), run heroku create [name] in the backend folder,
then git push heroku master.
Don't forget to update jsw.js with your own paths. They're documented in the source, so knock yourself out.
Pretty basic, eh.
So far, SFTP is the only backend, so the login box asks for your SFTP login and password.
Press enter in the password box to log in.
Ctrl+L focuses jsw's URL bar so you can quickly switch between pages (you can also use the browser's URL bar but it's slower).
Press enter in the URL bar to go to a given page.
Ctrl+S saves the current page (or rather, queues it for upload).
The URL bar becomes red when there are unsaved changes.