After spending a few hours playing around with the JotSpot beta, I can say that I like what I see very much so far. As a non-programmer who wants to learn a little HTML and doesn’t read manuals very often, I love the “View Source” feature in my browser. I can find a page I like and see how they put it together, learning by example. JotSpot takes this idea and runs with it.
To begin with, you can not only view the source for a JotSpot page; you can edit it too. OK, that wouldn’t be different from any other wiki if all the software allowed you to do was create free-form HTML pages. But it does a lot more than that. In fact, it does (at least) three new things beyond normal wikis that are pretty huge changes.
First, it lets you structure data. You can create form fields on a wiki page and make those fields searchable. You can even make form fields on an existing page so that you can cut free-form text and paste it into the form. This makes your data much more usable.
Second, it lets you access outside data sources. RSS is the easiest, but from what I can tell even with my severely limited markup skills, it looks fairly straightforward to pull in other types of sources too. For example, they give you a page where they use the Google API to pull in search results. Because it’s all in wiki, it’s easy for me to learn by viewing their source code, making a minor change (e.g., the search term), and testing it right there. The code in the example pages is superbly well commented to make learning by doing easy.
The third impressive thing that JotSpot does is that the accessing of external data sources can be bi-directional. Let’s say I have some data in three different systems that I want to look at. I can pull them all into the same JotSpot wiki page. But now I want to make a change in, say, the data in my CRM app. As long as the app itself allows it, I can change the data in the JotSpot field and have it automatically update in the CRM application. Very slick.
But the slickest thing of all is how easy it is. As an HTML poser, I regularly get stuck on tables and divs. If actually had to write significant SQL or PHP (or whatever) code to access data…well…forget it. But JotSpot appears to reduce all of this stuff to a simple declarative markup. You can apply CSS, etc., to it, but you don’t have to. I can build a simple but functional application in a few simple lines of code. (And by the way, unlike many wikis I’ve seen, the default result isn’t butt ugly.)
I’m just scratching the surface of this thing, really, and in some ways I’m not the best person to be testing it. But so far I’m really impressed.
By the way, Jon Udell has an interesting twenty-odd-minute Flash demo of the product. The demo itself is rough (no VCR controls, kinda blurry, etc.) but the content is highly informative. Some of the stuff I mention in this post I figured out from watching the demo and then going back to JotSpot to play.
