Moving from Jot Spot to TWiki

With the recent announcement about the new Google Sites application, a number of former Jot Spot customers have decided to migrate to TWiki. WikiRing partner C-Dot Consultants has been engaged to help, and this post describes our experiences.

Jot Spot stores topic data in an XML database. Within that database, actual topic data is stored as "decorated HTML"; the basic topic content is HTML, within which Jot applications are embedded using Jot Spot's proprietary script, which uses XML tags.

Because of some fairly fundamental architectural differences between Jot Spot and TWiki it's not simple to automate the conversion of Jot Spot applications to TWiki. Fortunately our clients have not invested heavily in developing Jot applications, but have instead chosen to use the applications that Jot Spot provide by default. So the focus of our work has been to:

1. Convert existing Jot Spot topics to TWiki, with minimal formatting loss
2. Map a subset of Jot applications (most notably the Bug Reporter) to TWiki

Fortunately we were able to secure an XML dump of the Jot Spot database. This has alllowed us to perform the conversion without relying on the patchy availability of the Jot Spot site. Conversion of Jot topics has been achieved by leveraging a couple of existing technologies:

• The SAX XML parser from CPAN
• The open-source HTML to TML convertor we wrote for WYSIWYG editor integration into TWiki

SAX allows us to parse the Jot XML, pick out the form fields, and identify the subset of the topics suitable for passing on to the HTML to TML convertor. The HTML to TML convertor is already a proven technology, used every day with the Tiny MCE integration in TWiki, so it is robust and minimises formatting loss.

On the receiving side, we have customised the publicly available TWiki:Plugins.BugsContrib to support the data fields from the reporter in Jot Spot. We have had to develop a number of new reporting screens, something which has been made much simpler by the use of the type="query" search we contributed to TWiki 4.2.

It's cheering to note how similar the structure of a Jot Spot topic is to a TWiki topic. I guess you could call it convergent evolution!