Comparing Swiki- and Bridge-based web tools

• Pluggable support for many types of collaborative content in addition to text pages. (Structured discussions, chats, drawings, imagemaps, equations, data tables, charts, gis-based maps, etc...)
• Support for synchronous editing and interaction using the Java WebStart-based "Full Editor"
• Flexible security support

• Referential integrity. Currently, renaming a page will break links to that page. (Design work on this problem is underway here.)
• Versions. Versions are currently saved when pages are edited from the web. Versions can also be explicitly created within the full (synchronous) editor. Work on automating version creation in the synchronous editor is underway here.) UPDATE: This has been implemented as of 020725.
• Version retrieval. Versions are currently saved and are viewable from the web, but there is no way to view old versions from the full editor, nor is there a way to easily revert back to old versions or to see diffs between two versions.
• Global change log. Swiki provides a mechanism that will let the user see a list of all recently-updated pages on a site. BRIDGE currently does not provide this capability, though design work for this problem is underway as part of the automatic versioning effort.
• Page deletion. Swiki does not provide a way to delete pages, making it more difficult to lose things. In bridge you can delete pages (and other objects) from within the full editor. We are currently not actually deleting such objects from the database, but there is also not a mechanism needs for easily restoring deleted objects.
• Page renaming. In swiki, pages are identified by their title, but are represented by numbers in urls. In order to have more meaningful URLs in bridge, page names appear in urls, and pages may also have titles that are distinct from their names. Currently names and titles can only be changed within the full editor. (See http://java.cs.vt.edu:8888/MOOsburgDesign/104 for more details on this.)
• Searching. In swiki, the search index is updated immediately on each change. In bridge, the indexing will lag somewhat. This is being addressed as part of the automatic versioning effort.