[annotator-dev] Fluidinfo backend store for annotator

[Kartik Subbarao]

Here's a first pass at a fluidinfo backend store for annotator:

https://github.com/kartiksubbarao/annotator-fluidinfo

The README has the install and usage instructions. The code is a single 
perl script:

https://github.com/kartiksubbarao/annotator-fluidinfo/blob/master/annotator-fluidinfo.pl

(The formatting is a bit off in places because my tabstops are set to 4, 
which the github viewer doesn't seem to like).

Perl was the easiest and fastest way for me to get it up and running. 
I'm willing to migrate it over to whatever language/environment works 
best for the annotator project -- assuming folks are patient with my 
learning curve in that environment :-)

Right now the implementation is pretty simple and limited, but it should 
handle the basics. I tested it with the annotator dev.html and it worked 
okay. Some notes:

1) There is no per-user authentication/authorization at the moment. All 
of the annotations are done as the username/password specified (via 
environment variables). Fluidinfo does not currently support a 
OAUTH-style authentication mechanism, but I think this sort of thing is 
planned. So we may need to have some further discussion with them to 
determine the best approach here.

2) For the time being, annotations are limited to one range. Supporting 
multiple ranges will require some more thought on the best way to 
represent the info in fluidinfo. Serializing into raw JSON text strings 
would be a brute force approach, but it'd be nice if we could do 
something better.

3) Permissions are not currently implemented. It will be interesting to 
compare the annotator permissions along with the fluidinfo permissions 
to see if there is any opportunity to leverage what fluidinfo provides.

If you can get a chance to try this out, I'd be very interested in any 
feedback/comments/suggestions. Also feel free to share your thoughts on 
the other message that I sent out regarding comment aggregation.

Regards,

	-Kartik