Getting Started

The important disclaimer, first:

This is experimental sample code. It should never be used in a production environment (ie. where you have any Groove spaces which are important or sensitive). It may have adverse effects. There are no warranties of any kind, and there is no support. Use at your own risk.

This uses "non-safe" ActiveX controls to talk to Groove's web services, to read and write files on your local disk, and to read and write your Windows registry. To let those things happen, you need to answer "yes" when IE asks whether it can run the "unsafe" ActiveX code. You should NOT allow this unless you TRUST THE CODE YOURSELF, because once you've said "yes", this code has complete access to your system and could do some very dangerous things. So: understand this, and do read the code.

• Read the disclaimer again. Read the security notes again.
• You're running IE6, right? This isn't tested in anything else, and certainly won't work in non-IE browsers.
• Right-click here and "save target as..." a file on your desktop. (It won't work from cabezal.com; the HTML file needs to be on your machine).
• Launch the file from your desktop.

• Groove Workspace 2.5j
• IE6
• Microsoft Office 2003 (for some fairly obscure reasons)
• ADO (MDAC) 2.8

What is dohyki?

dohyki is a simple experimental collaborative note-taking application. It's kinda like a small private wiki, and shares some of wiki's free-form ethos. I think it's even simpler to use than a wiki, though: there's no "edit this page" link, you're always in edit mode.

Notes (pages) are stored in a Groove "files" tool which you choose. If there are other members of the Groove shared space, you can all work together at the same time. You can even edit pages nearly-at-the-same-time if you want (although you'll end up with conflicts: this doesn't really work real-time like SubEthaEdit or the Groove Text tool).

To write a note, you just type in the page. There's no "save" button: your changes are saved automatically, and anyone else looking at the same page will see your changes.

To make a new page, just type something in CamelCase: after a few seconds it'll display as a hyperlink. Click on the hyperlink, and you'll be taken into the new page with that name. (There's a "new page" button too, if that sounds too hard).

Here's screenshot.

How does it work?

dohyki is an HTML document with lots of JavaScript. The JavaScript code uses SOAP to talk to Groove Web Services (which are part of Groove Workspace, which you need to have running on your machine). All the storage, multi-user synchronization, and such is done by Groove.

More

(More -- screenshots, tech notes, etc -- to follow sometime soon)