As an experiment to see what PHP5 can offer us Topic Mappers in terms of XML power, I fiddled a bit and came up with ... something quite interesting; a quite capable Topic maps engine. I've parsed most XTM files I could find through it, and it responds pretty well to them all. Bare in mind that this was a four hour experiment, but as such, it turned out that PHP's XML capabilites coupled with the new OO Zend2 engine and indexed arrays, I've churned out an engine that handles quite a lot of topics rather fast and effective. And I haven't optimised anything yet.

Here's what I'll do; Over at DotGeek.org I've obtained some hosting just dying to get used, and since I like the current results so much, I've decided to create an online Topic maps browser there. The engine is almost ready for some early beta application testing, so I'll make some simple "upload your XTM to this server" page and a general TM browser there. What do you think? Any other good uses for a Topic maps engine example? (Yes, don't remind me of the upcoming tutorials I'm writing ... :)