Eventually TiddlyWeb came to a bit of standstill. It was sufficiently complex to setup and then to manage that it did not penetrate beyond a savvy but fairly small audience. In particular many existing TiddlyWiki users who might have been interested in using TiddlyWeb did not have access to the resources to make it go. At Osmosoft we decided to create TiddlySpace to make tiddlers on the web easier to access by creating a multi-user environment where people could curate and share tiddlers and reuse (through inclusion) tiddlers from other people.
Again the initial goal was to make a TiddlyWiki based interface and again this proved to be constraining. TiddlySpace has made it clear that in the tiddly universe the tiddler is the thing. To some extent this is simply a matter of physics: a TiddlyWiki is a large single entity containing lots of other things. It is big and slow to load, just one thing, yet non-atomic. It is complex. A tiddler is just one thing, but one thing that can come in many forms.
The vast majority of use on TiddlySpace is done from within TiddlyWiki, but the (IMHO) innovative work is done with tiddlers and simple JavaScript based applications, often presented as ~SPAs: Single Page Applications. A tiddler operates as the data entity, the viewer of those entities, and as documents. Many different JavaScript tools have been used in the process: jQuery, Backbone, Bootstrap, etc.
TiddlySpace caught on pretty well, re-energizing TiddlyWeb development. For the first time large numbers of requests for large numbers of entities were being made. TiddlyWeb was shown to be slow and needed to be fixed. The large user base provided the data necessary to do accurate measurement and optimize those parts of the code that matter. This mostly meant turning naive Python into slightly more interesting Python (e.g. lists into generators) but also hardware, database and cache tweaking.
Additional features were created as well:
- Complex search
- PuSH notifications and webfinger
- Websockets
- JSON-P
- CORS support (coming soon)
- oAuth (coming soon, if somebody helps)
Eventually TiddlySpace became fast and functional enough that it is now a useful place to do web development in addition to web publishing. Either with TiddlyWiki or without. The tiddler operates as a nice augmented container for //something// on the web. It is quick and easy to make stuff and reference stuff. A web with some improved webby affordances.