Abora Hypermedia Project

Abora is an ongoing project to implement and nurture information systems that enable individuals and groups to create a rich literature of long lived works. The interconnected nature of documents will be supported from the core up through quoting and fine-grained typed links. Collaboration of individuals across time by concurrent modifications, strong versioning, refined change notifications, and external commenting. Extensible first-class document types from text to movies to structured research data. Resilient, adaptive and relevant implementations that will cope with and last for a lifetime of use. All-in-one solutions and generic server with API will be released under open-source licenses.

Current work on the project is strongly influenced by the ideas of Ted Nelson as articulated in his Xanadu hypermedia project, and also the design and implementation of Udanax-Gold by XOC.

A number of sub-projects exploring these aims are documented on this website. A limited demo was written in Summer 2002 that gives a flavour for some of the core features.

David Jones
david@dgjones.info
http://www.dgjones.info

New Readers Introductory Trail

If you are a first time visitor to this website, you may want to consider stepping through the following links. This should provide a reasonable overview of the Abora project.

• Features of the final Abora server.
• Applications and uses for a finished Abora.
• Screen shots from finished Abora elements.
• Tech Report for the Dolphin Demo recounts some of the implementation details of the server.
• Xanadu Uses links section describes scenarios where xanalogical servers such as Abora may be beneficial.

Sub-Projects

	Udanax-Gold2Java [In Progress 2001,2003,2005] Command line application to auto-translate the Udanax-Gold Smalltalk source into Java source code. The resulting Java code is compilable, and a small number of tests run, but it is still a long way from being a production grade system. The generated Java, with hand crafted supporting code, is being called Abora-Gold for the moment until a final name is resolved. Overview - Abora-Gold JavaDoc - Download Source
	Dolphin Demo [Paused 2002] Smalltalk implementation of a simple text editor that supports fine-grained typed links, transclusions, versions, backlinks and viewing differences. Written to explore aspects of the Udanax-Gold design and gain a feel for the capabilities a xanalogical system provides users. Extensive Technical Report on the mechanisms used to implement the core features of the demo. MS Windows executable demo available to play with. Overview - Tech Report - Download Demo
	Abora-White [Aborted 2003] Another java port of the Udanax-Gold server. This started from the result of a far earlier version of the Udanax-Gold2Java translator, that at the time only generated "approximate" java (7000+ compliation errors). Starting from this non-working Java code, the goal was to create a compilable, working version that aligned with standard Java idioms. With the significant progress subsequently made with the Udanax-Gold2Java translator, the Abora-White project has been abandoned. The hand code test cases, and porting of the primitive array classes may still be useful for the translator. Overview - Port Details - Download Source
	Udanax-Gold2Dolphin [Aborted 2001] First attempt by the author to investigate the Udanax-Gold code. The source was loaded into Dolphin Smalltalk and tweaked enough to allow most of the existing tests to run a little. Major roadblocks were from missing code, and the guesses that were made to make for those gaps. The result of this project was never packaged up for distribution, but source could be made available on request. Overview