Yesterday I have presented "Developing Situational Applications in XWiki" at Solutions Linux 2010. The goal of the talk was to explain how second generation wikis such as XWiki allow you to develop Situational Applications.

Here are my slides:

The demo was live and thus you cannot see it in the slides unfortunately. Here's what I demoed:

• Step 1: Create a page where we define what a TODO object is (a Class in XWiki parlance)
• Step 2: On a different page, add a TODO object and add some script in the page content to display in a table the content of TODO objects found on that page
• Step 3: Add a form to the page to allow users to create new TODO objects through a simple UI
• Step 4: Create a Wiki Macro object to hold the script code for presenting TODO objects in the page where the macro is used
• Step 5: Use the WYSIWYG editor to add the new TODO macro in a page, thus showing how to transform some technical code into a very simple to use macro that any user can use on his own pages to add a TODO application to any page

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!

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.

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):

Yesterday I have presented the OSSGTP Group at a Sun Open Source evening event.

Here are the slides:

If you're in Paris, France and you're an open source addict and developer come and join us. It's fun! Our mantra is Open Source from the source. The group is only composed of open source actors/developers. We meet every month (or we try to) and we have a diner together afterwards in pure French tradition… ;)

At long last I'm resurrecting my old blog and moving it to the XWiki platform (I've left the old blog posts there since I didn't want to loose comments and create broken links for people referring to the posts).

Funnily I stopped blogging when I joined the XWiki open source project in December 2006. I think the main reason is that I have been busy understanding the existing code base, refactoring it, managing the development team and unconsciously I wanted to become an XWiki expert before I could start talking about it and evangelizing it in a more open manner. Since I'm reading "Outliers" from Malcolm Gladwell I think I now understand how everything fits together:

• I've been working on the XWiki project for 2 years. Since I spend 70+ hours per week on it, that's close to 8000 hours since I joined the project.
• Malcolm Gladwell says that you need roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert in a given field

So I'm now close to becoming an XWiki expert and this makes me understand the project pretty well and as a consequence I now feel entitled and mature to blog about it! Okay this is a bit contrived and there's probably more to it but it feels good to relate these concepts together.

So starting today you'll see lots of posts about the XWiki platform in general or the lessons I learn while developing it.