bookwyrm
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What's New
- [2005-10-03] Bookwyrm 0.1 released
- [2005-09-10] Bookwyrm 0.1 alpha released
- [2005-09-06] Bookwyrm Project Accepted on MozDev
Other Stuff
Bookwyrm is an Interactive Fiction collection manager. When complete, it will allow browsing and download of large online game repositories, and a universal intepreter that can play any of the major virtual machine based game formats.
Bookwyrm uses game databases stored in RDF format, utilizing the vocabularies provided by the Interactive Fiction Metadata Initiative. Planned features include the ability to crawl online RDF datawebs, making Bookwyrm something of a Semantic Web application.
Development will follow three general stages:
- A Firefox extension, providing the basic features of cataloguing and launching games, but depending on external interpreters to run them.
- A standalone application, essentially a migration from Firefox to XULRunner when the latter reaches production level deployment. (And more to the point, when XULRunner has something resembling useful developer documentation.)
- Completion of remaining features, including the framework for internal plug-in interpreters.
Stage 1 is already well underway. Releases available on the installation page.
Project Status (2006-11-28)
Work is being held up by four factors:
- The Treaty of Babel has essentially murdered our attempt to get RDF metadata included with every IF game. The IFmd metadata specified in the treaty is utterly inadequate to Bookwyrm's needs, and always will be, no matter what extensions are introduced.
- The need for a major redesign of the application, using custom RDF datasources instead of the generic ones built into the Mozilla platform.
- The discovery that Mozilla's RDF implementation is no where near standards-compliant. It's becoming increasingly difficult to work around the unimplemented and incorrectly implemented features.
- The possibility that RDF support will soon vanish from the Mozilla platform altogether. This would necessitate moving Bookwyrm to a different framework.
I am not planning to abandon Bookwyrm, but all these difficulties and uncertainties have made me more inclined to work on other things as of late.
For more information on Interactive Fiction in general, see the if Wiki.