I was at the Paris JUG second anniversary yesterday where I presented "XWiki.org vs XWiki.com". This 15 minute talk was about the relationship that can exist between an open source project and a company behind that open source project. How to keep the company "honest" so that it doesn't do "evil" but still function as a company, i.e. make money and grow.

The event was great and here are some of the salient point I took out from it:

• It's great to see that the Java community is alive and kicking. Imagine: drawing close to 500 people at a JUG event! Well done Antonio and team.
• Very good keynote from Sacha Labourey on whether open source has come of age and the good and the surprises that happened. The presentation has resonated with my convictions at XWiki. It was also very nice to see Marc Fleury again, as a surprise guest, especially since he's now onto other stuff.
• Great presentation from Marc-Antoine Guarrigue on how he discovered computers and how we he came to become an open source developer working on JCaptcha and more. I thank Marc-Antoine for considering me as one of the person he took example on. The truth is Marc-Antoine is a great guy, humble and with a big heart, and very skilled at whatever he does. I also wish I could present as well as he did! Congrats again to MAG for his newborn baby Louise who apparently already likes drinking champagne ;)
• I liked the Play! framework concepts. Actually I found a lot of similarities from what we do in XWiki. I especially like the attention to details that they've put into their project, like the nice error reporting pinpointing the part of the source code failing. It was nice to talk to Guillaume Bort and Nicolas Leroux afterwards. Nicolas is a Riveria JUG leader and XWiki SAS is hosting its wiki. He reminded me that we really need to upgrade the XWiki JUG's farm to a more recent version (it's more than a year's old and in the meantime we've had about 15 releases!).
• I didn't know about jax-doclet before. Since we use JAX-RS in XWiki we'll have a look at it in order to document our REST APIs. It looks promising.
• I was happy to meet again Fred Do Couto who was providing Massages throughout the event (thanks for the "Amma Assis" Massage Fred!). Fred has started a company called VitaliZen doing Massages at events. He's still doing IT consulting while he bootstraps his business. Well done Fred, I admire you and the courage it takes to start a new endeavour especially as different as the one you were doing before. Great to see you were able to leverage those Massage sessions that we've had when we worked together for Vizzavi Europe back in 2001...
• 3 out of 4 castcodeurs were present at the event. For once it was Guillaume Laforge missing and not me! Emmanuel Bernard and I had a good talk with Didier Girard about how we could increase our castcodeurs podcast audience from the current 1500 recurrent auditors to more. Didier had some great ideas and he came back to us today with a full page list of new ideas he's had while sleeping overnight on it! (Remember that he probably went to bed around 3 or 4 in the morning so that's a major feat!)
• I was surprised to meet someone who's been knowing my name for a while but whom I had never met… Bernard Pons has been working at Societe Generale on the Progeliance Net code I wrote back in 1999 (you read it right, this is old! And it's still in production!). He had seen my name in @author tags all around the code… And he made me remember things I wish I had not written at the time… like stealing the Comparator interface written by Joshua Bloch and copying it into the codebase, removing his name and putting "@author vincent massol" instead… (remember it was JDK 1.1 or 1.2 and there was no Collections APIs in the JDK at the time). Did I really do that? :)
• Met with Emmanuel Huggonet, leader of the Alps JUG who's kindly invited me to talk in October (I'll be stopping by at the Lyon JUG for a talk there too - Thanks Cédric).
• Was happy to see my friend Benjamin Mestrallet back from the states. Ludovic Dubost and I talked to Benjamin about the XWiki Business Model and interesting ideas emerged...

+ met and discussed with the numerous fellow OSSGTP-ers whom I was happy to see, as always.

All in all, it was great and I had a wonderful time. I don't regret having had to come out of my cave in Chantilly to go to Paris… ;)

See you next year for the 3 years!

The end of the year 2009 is getting close and it's time to look back at what the XWiki open source project has achieved during this year.

2009 has been a tremendous year for the XWiki project, establishing XWiki as one of the best enterprise wiki (if not the best, but I'll let you be the judge on that ;)). I'm eager to see what 2010 will yield.

I'd like to take the opportunity to congratulate all the XWiki committers and all the XWiki contributors and users who've made this possible. Thanks everyone!

Releases in 2009

The XWiki dev team has released 58 versions in total for XWiki Enterprise, XWiki Enterprise Manager, XWiki Office and XWiki Eclipse. Not bad hey! More than 1 release per week as average. Here are the details:

XWiki Enterprise Features in 2009

Here's a list of major features developed in 2009 for XWiki Enterprise:

• WYSIWYG editor based on GWT
• Skin (Colibri) + complete action menus overhaul
• Color themes for easily customizing colors
• Rendering engine, allowing Polyglotism
• More powerful wiki syntax (XWiki Syntax 2.0)
• Dashboard
• Livetables allowing filtering, searching, sorting of data extracted from wiki pages in real time
• Lots of UI improvements, among which:
  • Document footer overhaul
  • Jump to page
  • AJAX save
  • Full screen editing
  • Threaded comments
  • Class/Object editor overhaul
  • Multiple attachment support
• Performance improvements (greater than 30% speed improvements)
• Office Importer (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Open Office)
• REST API
• Blog Application rewrite
• Watchlist improvements (scalability, support for wiki farms, improved email format)
• Lots of new Macros and Applications available on the Code Zone
• Introduction of Wiki Macros to develop macros directly inside wiki pages (and have them available from the WYSIWYG editor)
• Support for more scripting languages (in addition to Groovy which has been supported since the beginning): Ruby, Python, PHP
• Professional PDF export
• Clustering and Distributed events

I'm pretty sure I've forgotten a lot of new features but there are just too many to list them all.

Downloads in 2009

Downloads have kept increasing from the past year (almost doubled).

Mailing list Activity in 2009

The mailing lists have continued to see their activity increase, which means more users and more developers/contributors. Here's the figure of emails posted on the XWiki lists (each value is per month):

Note that this screenshot was taken on the 16th of December 2009 which explains why the last month has a low number of emails.

Active Committers and Contributors in 2009

We have 14 active committers, amongst which a good portion committing daily.

One area of improvement for 2010 is to redesign xwiki.org to make it more attractive and to value more people's contributions, and make people be more active on it, especially in the area of contributing macros, applications, code snippets, etc.

So far we have on Code Zone:

• 84 code snippets available
• 81 macros available
• 30 plugins available
• 50 applications available

I wish you all a very good Christmas season and a very good new year with lots of good wishes for improving XWiki in 2010.

I've presented "XWiki Enterprise 2.0 & Beyond" at the last OSSGTP meeting.

The presentation was divided into 3 parts:

• Some of the latest innovations available in XWiki Enterprise 2.0.
• The power of XWiki as an Application Wiki, i.e. the ability to develop small applications in the wiki itself.
• A glimpse of the future with work in progress and some of the planned new features

In addition this talk was recorded in French by OCTO Technology, who's organized the event (thanks to them!).

I've had the pleasure of presenting at talk with Tugduall Grall from eXo Platform on "Wiki vs CMS" at this great USI 2009 conference.

It was great to see such a turn up (the room was packed with people standing up) thus proving that lots of people are wondering what are really the differences between those 2 technologies and whether they are going to converge or not.

The main message of the talk was:

• For collaboration on content the wiki is king
• For publication of content the CMS is king

Update 2009-07-22: The talk was recorded (in French) and is now available here

Here are some details that were given verbally.

Slide 4 ("Edition de contenu")

• CMS
  • Strong focus on content publication
  • Strong Navigation / Categorisation
  • Publication processed based on user roles and permissions
  • Strongly structured content, existing content, known initially
  • Document models (article, calendar, product sheet, ...)
• Wiki
  • Strong focus on collaboration and content creation
  • The content self organize as time progresses
  • Content not known initially
  • Navigation using content (linking)
  • Validation process based on collaboration ("collective intelligence")
  • Innovation zone

Slide 7 ("Les wiki dans l'Entreprise")

• Wikis are on the verge of becoming mainstream in the Enterprise according to Gartner
• When this happens we'll see RFP for Enterprises looking for a Wiki (compared to the situation right now where it's users/projects installing Wikis) and it'll be IT departments who will provide on demand wiki farms for projects.

Slide 9 ("Quiz")

• We asked attendants whether they thought that the site done with a Wiki was the left one or the right one. The majority said it was the left one. Bad luck since it's the right one (France 2025) that was done with XWiki.
• This show that a web site and nice looking one at that can be realized with both tools. Wikis are no longer reserved for "ugly" sites ;)
• However the main reason that the France2025 was done with a wiki (XWiki) is that most of the site is about collaboration. It's about allowing French citizens to make proposals of what they think France should do at the 2025 horizon. They can also comments and rates proposals.
• On the opposite the left site is the belgium Tax payer site which requires strong validation before publication and hence was done with a CMS (eXo Platofrm) using a strong workflow.
• Thus even though both tools can be implemented for web sites the usages still mandate using a wiki or a CMS.

Slide 20 ("Outsider: Google")

• The conclusion was that Google was not really seen as a competitior but more someone you integrate with rather than compete with.
• Both XWiki and eXo had done integrations in the past with Google Docs/Spreadsheet and both are very eagerly waiting for integrating with Google Wave when it's out

I had the pleasure of presenting a talk on "Next generation Wikis: Mixing Content-Oriented Applications with Wikis" at Jazoon 2009.

Abstract:

The talk will present and demo characteristics of next generation wikis based on the XWiki open source project:

• Ability to develop content-oriented applications directly inside wiki pages
• Polyglot wiki: support of multiple wiki syntaxes
• Polymorphism: ability to use the wiki as a web site, an intranet or as a lightweight CMS
• Semi-structured: Mixing of structured information with free form content

Today, Web 2.0 applications are all the rage. A key feature of Web 2.0 applications is the ability to offer collaboration features to its users. Next Generation wikis offer a generic development platform that offers high level services for writing collaborative applications on top of them, such as Document editing and versioning services, multiple syntaxes services, rendering services, PDF/RTF/HTML export services, WYSIWYG editing, REST/GWT/XMLRPC service support, Storage services, Search services, multi instance services and a lot more.

The talk will demonstrate real-world realizations using next generation wikis showing what can be done and will assert that next generation wikis are one more tool in the developer's bag of tools to consider when developing collaborative and content-oriented web applications.

The demo I did was about creating a Holiday Request application from scratch inside XWiki.

Starting with XWiki Enterprise 1.7 we've released a new wiki syntax for XWiki (Since XWiki is now Polyglot you can continue to use the old XWiki syntax or use other wiki syntaxes). We're calling this new syntax by the delicious and original name of "XWiki 2.0 Syntax".

Here are some salient points of this new syntax:

• More consistent syntax and less error prone. All special syntax characters such as bold symbols, italics symbols, link symbols, etc all use 2 characters to prevent ambiguity in case you wish to use that character in your text. For example for bold you can write:

  **bold** but this is a star *

• Very close to Creole 1.0 (see the Creole 1.0 syntax). The goal of Creole is "a common wiki markup language to be used across different wikis. It's not replacing existing markup but instead enabling wiki users to transfer content seamlessly across wikis, and for novice users to contribute more easily".
• Meaningful new lines and spaces. This mean new lines are honored unlike traditional wiki-style new lines which are ignored. This was the number one feature asked by our users.
• Ability to enter wiki syntax in link labels. For example to add an image link you'd write:

  [[image:Space.Page@my.png>>reference]]

• Ability to pass parameters to any syntax elements including the ability to easily style them. For example to style a portion of text or a section header you can use:

  Some (% class="myclass" style="background-color:#E4E4E5" %)styled text

  (% style="color:blue" %)
  == header

• HTML must now be entered using the HTML macro. This allows to enter non-interpreted HTML in the main text. It also provides security control to wiki admins if they want to prevent users from entering HTML (and thus potentially harmful javascript). In addition the HTML macro automatically converts invalid HTML into valid XHTML.
• Easy linking to attachments using the link syntax. For example:

  [[label>>attach:Space.Page@img.png]]

• Strong table syntax including ability to have table headers as columns or as rows.
• Added scripting macros to enter XWiki scripts (We support JSR 223). For now we have official support for Velocity, Groovy and Jython, meaning that the full XWiki API is available directly to you using any of these scripting languages.
• Email-style quotations. For example:

  > john said this
  >> marie answered that

• Ability to group syntax elements together and thus support very complex use cases such as a table inside a list item inside a table. For example:

  | (((
  * item1
  * item2
  )))

• The syntax is powerful enough to represent most HTML elements thus allowing us to have a 100% bidirectional WYSIWYG editor with no information loss.
• Syntax for monospace, verbatim, definition lists, and more.

See the XWiki 2.0 Syntax Guide for more details. Note that we have an automatic converter that converts XWiki 1.0 syntax into 2.0 syntax.

We hope you'll enjoy this new syntax which we've tried to make the most powerful wiki syntax out there. Feedbacks welcome! :)

XWiki Enterprise allows users to leave comments on pages. However in order to prevent spam on your public wiki instance you usually only want to allow registered users the right to add comments. Thus we need a solution that still allows guest users to leave comments while preventing spam.

I'm proposing 2 solutions that I've both tried on this blog and that have worked well: Solution 1: create a special guest account that can be used transparently to leave comments. This can be achieved by creating a custom skin and tweaking the comments form Solution 2: integrate with an external comment web service such as IntenseDebate. This also requires a custom skin in order to override some templates.

Solution 1: Special Guest account

• Create a "Guest" user by going to the Administration page.
• Modify the Skins class so that the comments property points to the commentsinline.vm file (instead of the comments.vm one). Go to the XWiki.XWikiSkins page and change the Name field for the Comments property to "commentsinline.vm". Save.
• In the Administration page, click on the Presentation icon and then click on the "Customize" button in the Skin section. Click "Edit this Skin" to edit the skin.
• Modify the "Style" property field for better avatar display with the following content.
• Modify the "Comments" property field with the following content. This change adds several fields to the comments form that guest users can fill and provide a direct link to log in guest users.

When done you should get the following comment feature:

Solution 2: Integration with IntenseDebate

• Register on IntenseDebate to get a key to interact with their system.
• Modify the Skins class to add 2 new fields so that we can override them. Go to the XWiki.XWikiSkins page and use the right panel to add 2 text area fields named "htmlfooter.vm" and "docextra.vm". Save.
• In the Administration page, click on the Presentation icon and then click on the "Customize" button in the Skin section. Click "Edit this Skin" to edit the skin.
• Modify the newly added "htmlfooter.vm" property field by adding the following content.
• Modify the newly added "docextra.vm" property field by adding the following content. Make sure you modify the replace-with-your-intense-debateid-here value in the pasted content with your IntenseDebate id.

Here's what you'd get:

IntenseDebate is really nice and it offers the following features:

• Comment threading
• Reply by email
• Importing / exporting comments
• Commenter profiles
• Reputation points and comment voting
• Moderation / blacklisting, Profanity filter and Akismet spam filtering
• Widgets
• RSS feeds and reader tracking
• Twitter / friendfeed integration
• OpenID authentication
• Commenter gravatar
• HTML formatting

Most people probably think that XWiki is a wiki. This is the same as saying that Eclipse is a Java IDE.

In the same manner that Eclipse is a generic platform for developing applications, XWiki is a platform for developing any type of collaborative web applications. You can view it as an Application Server offering high level services relevant to developing collaborative applications. Example of such services are: Versioning service, Document service, Storage service, Attachment service, Authentication/Authorization service, WYSIWYG editing service, Wiki Service, and more as shown on the diagram below

Note that the list of services listed on the diagram is far from exhaustive and there are more since the image was created (like the GWT API, Scheduling service, REST API, etc).

So what type of collaborative applications can you develop with XWiki? Here are some examples:

• Collaborative RSS reader. By the way there's an instance running here for monitoring everything about XWiki that is said on the web.
• Workspace-based collaboration tool
• Merchant website. I'm sure you didn't recognize XWiki on that site! If you're like me and don't recognize XWiki check this link.
• Project Management tool. Note that development for it has been stopped.
• Online educational course creation and sharing
• A lot more… See other examples of XWiki usages

I was invited to present the XWiki project at the GlassFish TV yesterday.

That was fun: I was at home with a headset on a conf call (I was using skype), presenting a presentation I had sent earlier on to my host (Jacob Kessler from Sun). Jacob was recording live the audio and the presentation slides. I'm now eager to see the result and I hope the voice quality isn't too bad.

I presented quickly what XWiki is and moved to show XWiki's growth in 2008 and then moved on to the meat of the talk which were the new features the XWiki project is releasing with XWiki Enterprise 1.8.

Here are the slides (note that Slideshare didn't do such a good job of converting my ODP presentation so you might want to download the slides):

I had the pleasure of presenting the XWiki 2009 Roadmap at a breakfast event organized by XWiki SAS.

I started the presentation by showing XWiki project stats for 2008, showing how active XWiki development is (see slides 3 and 4):

• Downloads in 2008: > 130K (double the downloads of 2007)
• Number of releases in 2008: 65 (13 final releases and 52 milestone releases)
• Active committers: 14 (double the active committers in 2007)
• Mailing list activity is exploding since 2008

Live stats can be also be found on SVNSearch (See this blog post for details on SVNSearch).

Here are the slides I presented (sorry they are in French and I did several demos you cannot see obviously):