Spell Checker Using Web Services

Refactored from SpellChecker.

-- RichardDonkin - 21 Sep 2001

It's probably worth checking out if some of the web-based spell checkers are suitable for Twiki use before spending precious development time (which could be used to wrap up the new release :)) coding it from the ground.

There's an excellent XML-RPC example on W3Future that seems to be both very fast and intuatively easy to use. It uses the speller RPC Interface created by David Adams that interfaces with ispell (he's planning to use aspell).

-- DavidHeinemeierHansson - 30 Jun 2001

Hey, XmlRpc is a predecessor to WebServices. Looks like another call for TWikiAsWebServicesClient.

-- MartinCleaver - 30 Jun 2001

Since TWiki is intranet-focused, it would be a bad idea to make spell checking depend on an Internet server. Any spell checker should be done as a plugin so it should have little impact on core developers, who should indeed stay focused on the new release

-- RichardDonkin - 30 Jun 2001

I'd imagine that most if not all of corporate Twiki installations in the world also have access to the Internet, so I don't think connectivity is that much of an issue.

Besides, having a spell checker available is not an essential feature. Just have a small script check if it's possible to contact the spell checker services before showing a button for it (or something like that).

Anyway, I agree that we shouldn't do anything to slow down the new release, so I'll head out and do some investigation on my own.

-- DavidHeinemeierHansson - 01 Jul 2001

So, we "just" have to tell them to install a WebServices spell-checker server on their intranet...

-- MartinCleaver - 01 Jul 2001

Topics discussed by working groups on intranets tend to be confidential. This means that strict access control is necessary. WebServices and any other off server services (translators, spelling checkers, ...) are not acceptable if they could not be controlled by the same access control mechanism and do not follow the same access and data handling policies as the original server.

For this reason we blocked the access to translation engines like babelfish to not allow the leakage of any company proprietary information. Same for other WebServices.

-- HubertWeikert - 01 Jul 2001

Dammit, haven't thought about that :). Sending all your topics (or all those spell checked) in clear text over an unsecure connection is probably not the best idea. So now we just need to find a spell checker webservice that allows some sort of encryption.

-- DavidHeinemeierHansson - 02 Jul 2001

To protect the connection to the webservice is only one half of a solution. You need a trustworthy service provider, since your (internal) documents are handled/stored/translated/spellchecked on his systems. Hopefully your documents are not forwarded to some third party.

-- HubertWeikert - 02 Jul 2001

Well, we need an off-the-shelf one that they can install on their *intra*net. As Hubert says, Encryption is a red-herring.

I bet someone will wrap ispell in WebServices soon, it might have already been done.

-- MartinCleaver - 02 Jul 2001

There is now a prototype of a GoogieSpell based SpellChecker in GoogieSpellContribDev.

-- PeterThoeny - 23 Oct 2006