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Design and development of information management tools.

Xelog

Sider is not the only project I'm working on. I'm also occupied by Xelog (XML log), an application to help manage change log for software projects and shows it with different veiws (web page, text file, PDF, etc). I started wiki for the project and have online example.

I started this project when I faced the problem of having a history of changes for JSForms. I was considering generating a change log from the history of SVN commits or from the fixed issues list, but I don't think it can be done in intelligent, simple manner. Change log is usually written for the user to show what's new and updated in the application. Source control and issues comments usually written for developers, to help understand the changes and remind about them when the code is read at a later date. In most cases the change log has to be written by hand.

I decided that if I'm going to manually create and update a separate file just for capture history I want to have a standard, cansistent way of doing it. I figured XML is versatile and well suited for storing data, so I'm using it.

Xelog XML schema describes the change log XML document structure. It's handy, since many XML editors can use it to provide auto-complete support.

XSLT is used to have different views. At this moment there're two views (both show log in HTML) and there's no way to change the view. In time that will change.

I also want to add support for writing the change log using browser instead of XML editors. It will abstract away the XML document from the author and simplify log management.

The project is free and open source. Forum is open for discussion. You can also read issue tracker or project change log. I'm still working on the code and will to release it as soon as it's usable. If there will be people interested in contributing I'll set up an online SVN.

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Readability Stats: Word Count: 334; Sentence Count: 22; Grade Level: 7.4, more info...
Published Aug 08 2006, 12:52 PM by Ornus
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Comments

 

Matthias Miller said:

That's pretty cool. I can't wait to see it with an interactive editor. This has many interesting possibilities--have you considered transforming into RSS feeds?

August 21, 2006 7:18 PM
 

Matthias Miller said:

By the way, I'm noticing that the word "considered" contains a hyperlink to the Sider project. This looks like a bug. Also, it seems the issue tracker is unavailable right now.

August 21, 2006 7:19 PM
 

Ornus said:

Yeah, thanks, "considered" is a bug, I'll look at it tomorrow.

Issue tracker is up and running now. I was updating it and ran into some issues that forced me to take it down. http://bugnet.emeraldhand.com/Bugs/ProjectSummary.aspx?pid=7 should work for Xelog now.

I haven't thought about RSS. Sounds like an interesting idea. I could probably do that. Thanks for the tip:)

August 21, 2006 8:43 PM

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About Ornus

Lead Sider and Xelog developer. I'm interested in information and how we can better manage it using computers. I'm also into design and understanding how to creating cool, useful, simple things.
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