This weekend, I’m hoping to release a beta of a wiki system I’m developing called ‘Mango.’� My intention is to start off with some basic wiki functionality, get some testers, revise, then produce a version 1 release which will be available for free download on the web.

Ultimately, I would like to do a full product launch a month or two from now which includes a boxed version of this software.� The commercial, packaged version will include the Mango software, printed and digital user manual, and video tutorial cd-rom and/or dvd.

I will be hosting a live version of Mango at http://mango-demo.revillini.com.

I will also host my family wiki using Mango at http://family.revillini.com - this was the original intent of the software, even though it does not yet have any geneology-specific features at this time.

I was right. If the server sends a response and the ‘Content-Type’ attribute is ‘text/xml’, you must send at least a root node so the xml parser that is built into Mozilla’s XMLHTTPRequest object doesn’t cak and give you a ‘no element found’ Javascript error.

This could be an issue for those of us who are trying to do the REST thing and send back proper status codes depending on the request method and actions taken by the server. A 204 (Updated) or 205 (Deleted) response cannot, by definition, have any content body, so sending a root node is not an option to get around this error. The server needs to determine if the response is going to have an xml content body and assign the Content-Type on the fly.

I think I figured it out. I think that the issue crops up if your server sends a response header of ‘Content-Type’ set to ‘text/xml’ and you send no content. The XMLHTTPRequest object then says ‘oh it’s xml? fine - i’ll just PARSE THIS and store it in the reponseXML property.’ At that point, the XML Parser probably bombs and nothing catches it. But anyway that’s just a hunch and I’m only blogging about it because I’m bored. I’ll have test results available later.

Firebug 0.4.1 and 0.4.0 suffer from a very peculiar bug. If you create an object with a property called ‘-URL’, you can not use console.log to see the value of the property using the console.

Steps to reproduce:

In the console, type

x = {'-URL' : 'foo.pdf', '-Size' : 100};

Now type

x

Now press enter and click on the [Object object] item which shows up in the console. You will see the ‘-Size’ property, but not the ‘-URL’ property. Next, enter the following into the console and press Enter:

x['-URL']

You should now see “foo.pdf” get output to the console. So the value is in Javascript memory, but Firebug won’t show it to you. On a related note, you also cannot view methods of a custom object which are defined using the same means as described above … most of the time. Sometimes it works, so I can’t say for sure what the steps are to reproduce this behavior every time. Why am I blogging about this? Hopefully it will save some other Javascript developer a few hours. Credit goes to my friend, Matthew Metnetsky, for showing me the issue.

I’m planning to relaunch an old project I started - my family wiki. When I do, it will be at http://family.revillini.com/

Right now I’m trying to decide on which wiki to use. I should probably use phpwiki since it will probably be the most compatible with the database I already have started.