Review: JotSpot

JotSpot, Free up to 20 pages, $9/month up to 250 pages, more extensive hosted plans available
JotSpot, Inc.
Palo Alto, California
(650) 320-9300
http://www.jot.com/index.php

JotSpot calls itself "The Application Wiki," and while you might not think that a hosted wiki is a viable business model, a test drive here might well change your mind. First off, of course, the JotSpot folks have taken the experience of setting up a wiki and made it painless (two minutes, one Web form, one e-mail, done); compared to the hassles of getting most wiki software running, that's a substantial improvement. My five-year-old could do it. Heck, my lawyer could do it. Beyond that, though, JotSpot has obviously put a lot of thought into making a wiki easier for beginners to use and a more powerful platform for development. It's a good combination.

For example, have you ever tried to teach standard wiki markup to a non-developer business user? I have, and it's not all that easy. JotSpot gets around this by embedding a Word-like editing control in the browser when you go to edit a page. If you prefer, you can edit in the underlying markup, but you don't have to. You take a one-time hit to download the control, but after that it's a lot more convenient to have modern toolbars handy than it is to remember the arcana of wiki markup. Other nice touches that the average user will notice are the ability of any page in the wiki to receive or send e-mail (making it easy to us a wiki to maintain a mailing list, or to store things that you receive in your inbox), and a set of pre-built applications (things like a todo list, a call log, or an event calendar) that you can choose from a gallery to embed in your wiki.

The applications are written in JotSpot's own Cold Fusionesque markup language, and the power for developers comes in tapping this language, which is pretty easy to deal with (thanks to plenty of online documentation and examples). You can build forms, turn pages into databases, import CSV files and make them into applications (so those ubiquitous Excel tracking applications can make the leap online easily), and hook into online information easily - one line of markup will get you Google or Yahoo search results, for example. There's a REST API for manipulating your wiki from afar, there's a way to embed server-side javascript, there's CSS theming, and when you need it, there's access to the data beneath your structured pages in XML format. The net result is you can start with the standard pile-of-pages wiki and gradually hammer pieces of it into more structured Web applications if you need or want to. An access control system helps prevent the naive users from breaking the things that the developers carefully craft.

It's an interesting system, and a nice way to ramp up an intranet from random information to Web applications with a very shallow learning curve. The recently launched (and free) JotSpot Developer Connection is an associated home for all the developer information and samples, including extensibility through plugins and themes. Overall, this looks like an active and fun platform for hosted Web development.

  Click for larger screenshot

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Published September 13, 2005