PLink - Search Engine, Blogging, Content Management, and more.

DolphinNet™ is an easy to use server and distributed processing library for Java™. Like RMI, DolphinNet™ uses objects to communicate between a client and server. DolphinNet™, however, approaches this task using object serialization over a standard TCP/IP connection.

DolphinNet™ was designed by me for a 4^th year research course, and was originally intended for facilitating distributed processing tasks (document clustering to be exact), it has since been put to use in several different ways:

• A chat server/statistics collection system for a marketing research study.
• The back-end for an online applet based poker game.
• The client server system for the partially complete Vulgate MMORPG.
• A P2P web-browser and HTML renderer.
• In conjunction with Tomcat, it provides PLink’s search functionality.
  • Including the website indexing, which is done by a client.

DolphinNet™ has been used by me and my peers for several years now, but I have never made it public. I’ve recently decided to make it available with a GPL license, and feel that it could be a useful tool to any Java™ programmers out there, who are looking to add some great OOP client/server software to their programming arsenal.

DolphinNet Main Page

PLink Textile

PLink - Search Engine, Blogging, Content Management, and more.

Several people have been asking for the ability to perform richer editing on the text in paragraph elements — don’t worry, I’m always open to new ideas. Rather than make a proprietary PLink markup, I have implemented the markup used by Dean Allen’s Textile™. Textile is easy to use, and quite powerful. This having been said, I wasn’t satisfied with the Java™ Textile libraries that already existed, so I have been busy programming my own parser for its specification.

Which brings us to PLextile™, a complete Java™ library for parsing Dean Allen’s Textile which has been implemented by the PLink team. Unlike other existing Java™ implementations of Textile, Plextile™ supports all of its major features:

PLink Textile

iPlink for iGoogle

PLink - Search Engine, Blogging, Content Management, and more.

Just in time for iChristmas, we at PLink have thrown together a simple little widget that lets you post notes to any section of your PLink documents from your iGoogle homepage. These notes are inserted as a paragraph element, and are quite useful for roughing out your blogs/documents/manifestos from a remote location – potentially whilst looking up stuff on Google. You can of course use Plextile Textile during these posts.

iPlink for iGoogle

A Techy Blog for the Techy Masses

What started as a CIS project for creating technical documents has – over a span of two years – become PLink. Several months ago a corporeal voice said to me – it might have been my own – “Ben, why don’t you apply some of the research you’ve been doing, and make a search engine?” The idea (essentially) was to make a search engine that relied on voting to rank search results.

To make a long story short, during the process of making this search engine, I realized that PLink would be a good venue to dust off some old code I had been working on for creating online technical documents – this became somewhat of an obsession. I began outlining the sorts of features that I would enjoy in blogging software, with an emphasis on the ability to create technical documents online....

A Techy Blog for the Techy Masses