Zorap web pages are multi-party multimedia environments. Video from your webcam and audio from your microphone, photos, music and video from your own computer are shared to tens of your friends via a Zorap Server. Web content, including YouTube and other video sites are similarly shared, all in an exciting and customizable drag-and-drop interface.

Electric Magic implemented the Mac-specific portions of the Zorap web plugin, supporting Safari, Firefox and other modern web browsers.

Knowledge Forum 4.6's minor version number change belies just how different from its predecessor it really is.

Under the hood KF 4.6 has moved from using ZDBase for its backing store, instead using a tuplebase. This makes it possible to split HTML page generation into separate processes, potentially running on multiple front end machines. It also restores support for a rich client application, now written in Java, using ZTSoup to efficiently communicate changes in the tuplebase, whether made by other clients or by the web interface.

WebDAV is an extension to the HTTP protocol. It is the basis for Apple's iDisk and Windows' Web Folders, standard features of Mac OS X and Windows XP. It is thus the easiest way for a server to make data available to a client machine without requiring that client software be installed first.

ZooLib provides a generic WebDAV server. Your application need only implement subclasses of ZNodeRep to represent nodes in your desired hierarchy. Standard subclasses of ZNodeRep let you lay one tree over another, or expose part of the server's file system to clients.

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Knowledge Forum 4.5 was a significant refinement of Knowledge Forum 4.0, with a much richer web interface, although still constrained by the need to support Netscape 4.x-era web browsers.

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ZooLib's UI code requires only that there be a ZFakeWindow-derivative at the top of the enclosure hierarchy. In the distant past ZooLib included implementations of ZFakeWindow for Mac control panel cdevs, HyperCard XCMD windows, MacroMind Director XObject windows, Zoom closures, MacApp views and of course still does for ZOSWindows.

It was thus relatively straightforward to implement ZFakeWindow_NSPlugin, which translates between the Netscape browser plugin and the ZFakeWindow APIs. What was actually more difficult was finding a decent implementation of the plugin glue code and header files. In 2002 there wasn't anything that would work with current compilers and with current browsers, so most of the effort was in putting together ZNSPlugin, which is a usable implementation of the glue.

Knowledge Forum 4.0 took the radical direction of being web-only. We'd had some support for web access by virtue of a perl program that used the client's communications protocol to talk directly to the server, but perl wasn't pre-installed on Mac OS (Classic) or Windows, and it had some performance problems. So we ported the perl software to C++ and incorporated it into the server directly.

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ZooLib is an Open Source (MIT License) C++ library that makes it easy to write one set of source and build an application for Windows, Mac and UNIX. It provides a foundation suite of facilities that in essence form a virtual operating system API, and wide range of higher-level facilities that build on that foundation.

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