PNNL

Abstract

Virtually everyone familiar with today’s world wide web has encountered the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia many times. What you may not know is that Wikipedia is driven by an excellent open-source product called MediaWiki which is available to anyone for free. This has led to a proliferation of wiki sites devoted to just about any topic one can imagine. Users of a wiki can add content -- all that is required of them is that they type in their additions into their web browsers using the simple markup language called wikitext. Even better, the developers of wikitext made it extensible. With a little server-side development of your own, you can add your own custom syntax. Users aware of your extensions can then utilize them on their wiki pages with a few simple keystrokes. These extensions can be custom decorations, formatting, web applications, and even instances of the venerable old Java applet. One example of a Java applet extension is the Jmol extension (REF), used to embed a 3-D molecular viewer. This article will walk you through the deployment of a fairly elaborate applet via a MediaWiki extension. By no means exhaustive -- an entire book would be required for that -- it will demonstrate how to give the applet resize handles using using a little Javascript and CSS coding and some popular Javascript libraries. It even describes how a user may customize the extension somewhat using a wiki template. Finally, it explains a rudimentary persistence mechanism which allows applets to save data directly to the wiki pages on which they reside.