We are using Trac as Wiki and after a couple of months using it as main know-how repository, we tend to loose the overview of the myriad of pages and how they are linked to each other. A graph representing the relation between the pages would be very useful.
I could not find any plugin or tool, so it would be a good exercise to create a tool that convert a trac wiki into a graph.
Options:
- Use Java or Groovy. I choose Groovy because less boilerplate for standard tasks, such as creating xml, reading text files, etc.
- XML-RPC to access the wiki directly. I tried to create a mockup in Java, but failed due to the cryptic error messages and hard to debug.
- Trac backup to retrieve wiki data: You can create a backup in form of an INSERT sql file containing the complete structure of the wiki (inclusive of non-user content and all revisions of the wiki. I choose this as a starting point until I get the XML-RPC problem solved (maybe in Groovy).
- Visualization in JGraph, InfoVis, Prefuse or other toolkits. I decide for Prefuse because it is feature complete, powerful and I created simple applications previously.
Current Implementation:
- A simple Groovy script that works in 2 stages, a) reading and processing the sql backup file and b) creating a xml file that my prefuse viewer can display.
Future Plans:
- Create a standalone SwingXBuilder application
- Create a Netbeans Plugin
