The Zile

Ancient Egyptians relied on the Nile River to explore the greatness of the Sahara Desert, gathering into communities along the Nile valley and developing advanced societies. The Zile is a means for modern-day programmers to study the many features of Zero; it is like a river flowing through a new land, attracting new people and fostering new communities. It is a place where conversations start and collaborations blossom.

The Zile is a set of components built with Project Zero. It is focused on collaboration, social networking, and light business transactions. Many types of communities can be built using Zile including campus exchange sites, local church Web sites, and professional association sites. Members of the community can create profiles, create contact lists, set up personal Web pages, and maintain to-do lists, calendars, photo albums, and blogs. The following sections describe configuring and using Zile.

Zile components

Profile service (zile.profile)

Profiles are the central elements of collaboration. They represent the identifiable individuals in the community with attributes that are conducive to social networking such as credentials, areas of expertise, organization, professional publications (such as blogs and articles), and group affiliations.

Blogging service

Blogging is one of the key features of community; it enables users to collaborate with self-publishing, cross referencing, and commenting (on other's blogs) to enrich personal profile and improving each users online presence. The Zile blog component will include an integrated tagging capability.

Tagging service

The tagging component provides both user interface and back end implementation to support tagging capability.

Rating service

This component provides both UI and back end implementation to support the creation of ratings of arbitrary things.

Commenting service

This component provides both UI and back end implementation to support the creation of comments on arbitrary things.

File sharing service

Using the file upload pattern, this component provides user interface and storage to upload and share files with other members.

Zile samples

Zero Zone

The Zero Zone is a Project Zero application that combines Zile services and widgets to offer a place for collaboration and networking.

Configuring Zile

You can configure and run Zile components in Eclipse or with the command line as the following articles describe:

• Configuring and running Zile in Eclipse
• Configuring and running Zile in CLI