Name for the concept of placing the contents of a whole website into a single file and serving it directly from there. By Neil Madden.
He, Neil, already uses something near to this for his personal website, based on Metakit and tDOM. I.e. he stores XML and converts that to HTML. This is currently done offline. The moment this is changed to online generation the StarSite is complete.
AK: Related to this is a notion by BrowseX. This browser allows the retrieval of a website and its storage into a zip-archive. This is usually meant for easy transfer of a website, but also allow display of the archive via BrowseX, without unpacking it (IIRC - AK).
AK: Obvious extensions of the concept.
Depending on the exact nature of how web pages are stored in the StarSite this can have significant overlap with the code base providing the Tcl'ers Wiki. Especially as some discussed extensions to it would allow the storage of not only Wiki markup, but other types of data as well, like images, HTML, or XML. The similarity should be clear by now.
AK: [*] I should explain. My first association was that the code providing access to the contents of the StarSite was part of the StarSite Metakit, in a VFS, making the StarSite a StarKit, or StarPack. As the Wiki codebase shows that doesn't have to be the case. The StarKit containing the code can be distinct form the Metakit database containing the StarSite.
Regarding editing: For HTML this might have to be a free-form editor. For XML we can use StarDOM. Also note that the AlphaTk editor already has a Wiki mode. Extending this to HTML and XML modes might be simple. This implies that the StarSite access StarKit does not need to have the editor embedded into it, although that is an option too. It just has to have way of invoking editors we can hook our prefered editor into.
NEM - Yes, I was thinking along these lines. Some other things I am considering are:
Lots to think about. I think that getting the authentication/access-control stuff right will be the toughest bit. Looking at zope, everything seems to be an "object" (including users, scripts, static content), which can have access permissions granted to it. I know adding security features might seem like overkill, but it needs to be there from the start if anyone wants to use it (which I will). Adding it in later would be a bit hackish.
NEM - Excellent summary. This is exactly what I was planning. My main interest was in XML/XSLT generation of content, but really anything should be possible. The StarSite would sit on the server, and intercept requests using the PATH_TRANSLATED variable. So, for instance, in my website currently, the script xml.cgi can be invoked like http://www.tallniel.co.uk/cgi-bin/xml.cgi/home.xml which grabs the home.xml file and applies necessary stylesheets to it. Likewise, images could also be requested and returned from the database. The fact that MetaKit is the backend, allows for sophisticated searching and user interface options (session management, personalisation etc). Mirroring a site would be a case of copying one, highly-compressed MetaKit datafile. I find this concept quite exciting.
Note that the Wikit is a case of putting the _contents_ of a website into a file. I see above that Starsite would include a web server and, rather than using a markup style and conversion like the wikit does right now, would use xml as the markup and tdom or tclxml as the conversion software. Another difference appears to be that wikit is about content management, in a sense, in that visitors to the web site have the ability to update the pages. What other differences are envisioned?