I've noticed that Atlassian was holding a Summit yesterday. Apparently it was a success with 2100 attendees. That's great to see and I wanted to congratulate them on that!.

As a developer on the XWiki project what sparked my interest were the announcements related to Confluence. Although I haven't viewed the video yet (it wasn't posted when I checked), I've gathered the following from tweets and blog posts I've noticed:

• New File Collaboration:

   "You’ll be able to share files through Confluence and collaborate on them in much the same way you already do with pages, using @mentions and in-line comments.

• Real time collaborative editing:

   And it’s not uncommon for two or more people to need to make updates to the same page at the same time. That’s why we’re bringing real-time collaborative editing to Confluence. (yes!) Timeframe for delivery is a bit nebulous at this point, but the dev team is already plugging away on it

• Inline comments on highlighted text:

   Oh, and in-line commenting? Yeah, that’s coming to Confluence pages in 5.7, too.

These are all very nice features. Actually they're so nice that the XWiki project has been working on them for some time too, some being there for years and some being more recent. So here's how XWiki would compare on those features:

• File Collaboration. We have a very nice File Manager allowing users to easily import lots of files inside XWiki, manage them inside the wiki. You can comment on files, tag them, add wiki content related to the files, and more.

  

• Real time collaboration. We have been working on years on real time collaboration in partnership with Academia (INRIA to be precise). We wanted to have realtime for both the Wiki editor and also the WYSIWYG editor. We've tested various solutions and in the end we've found some algorithms that seem to work well. Thus we now have 2 extensions for Real time:
  • Realtime Wiki Editor
  • Realtime WYSIWYG Editor
• Inline comments. XWiki has had support for Annotations for years now (4 years to be precise), allowing users to select text and put an annotation on that text. You can even reply to annotations and they are resilient to reasonable changes from the highlighted content!

  

IMO this shows several things:

• The open source XWiki project is keeping its innovation rate and is still ahead in term of features
• A small team can do miracles (the XWiki dev team is much smaller than the Confluence one)

Go XWiki, go!

I had the pleasure to present at Human Talks. I presented how an open source company works internally and the challenges of handling potentially conflicting interests between business interests and open source interests. My experience is based on the XWiki SAS company and the XWiki open source project.

It was a fun event, held at Mozilla Paris in a very nice room (fun fact: on this picture, which was taken on the day Mozilla opened the office, you can see Ludovic Dubost - with the blue polo -, creator of the XWiki open source project and founder of the XWiki SAS company ).

Thanks Human Talks for the invite!

Another year @ FOSDEM with the XWiki gang: Ludovic, Marius, Anca, Oana and Fabio!

This year though we succeeded in getting dev room (yeah!), a wiki dev room, that I co-organized with Quim Gil from Wikimedia and Jean-Macr Libs from tiki.org.

The XWiki project was lucky to have 6 talks:

• XWiki Rendering: A content rendering engine by me
  XWiki Rendering @ FOSDEM 2014 from Vincent Massol
• Wikis cross-project collaboration, a Panel session where Ludovic participated
• Developing the XWiki software by Marius
• 5 Unexpected usages of wikis by Ludovic
• A web development runtime platform based on the wiki paradigm by me
  XWiki: A web dev runtime for writing web apps @ FOSDEM 2014 from Vincent Massol

It was a nice FOSDEM. We enjoyed Belgian waffles and French fries as usual (although I heard some enjoyed it a bit less than usual since they were on a low-carb diet ).

At the content level, the conference was slightly too low-tech for me, a Java developer. Lots of C/C++ guys and lots of stuff close to the hardware  Not that I don't think it's nice to do that, but rather that I can't participate much. There were some other tracks more of interest to me like the Java dev room (but I was stuck in the wiki dev room at the same time so couldn't join) and the Javascript dev room but this one was so full that it was near impossible to get in...

I'd personally love to see some more room/space given to open source in businesses for the future editions of FOSDEM.

With over 8000 participants it seems it was, once again, a very successful FOSDEM.

See you next year maybe!

It was a long since I last attended Devoxx Belgium. It was a pleasure to be there again and meet all my friends. I was also happy to be able to present XWiki even though it was only for a quickie (15 minutes).

I presented the ability to quickly create applications within a wiki with the "Application Within Minute" feature of XWiki.

Here's the video:

 ...

I was invited to speak about XWiki at the Alpes JUG and the Mars JUG on 10th and 11th of October 2012. I gave 3 presentations at each JUG:

• Presentation of XWiki from a user point of view (sorry, no slides since this was done purely as a demo) (30 mn)
• Explain how XWiki can be used to develop web applications quickly and why it can be considered a development platform (1.5 hours)
• Present how the XWiki open source development is performed (1 hour)

I had a great time at both JUGs. The Mars JUG was a bit more active than the Alpes one with over 30 persons present vs 15 (come on guys, now you need to beat the Mars JUG next time! ). 

OTOH my stay at Grenoble was a bit safer than the Marseille trip... Indeed, I got to witness a murder in Marseille a few minutes after it happened...

On the food topic, I had some great sushis with Julien Viet in Marseille (seems the murder we witnessed didn't make us loose our appetite... ).

Ok so here are the slides (I also did lots of demo during the talk and unfortunately you won't be able to see them - I also spoke a lot more than on the slides, sorry about that - But then you should haven been there! ).

Thanks to Emmanuel Hugonnet and Julien Viet for inviting me.

Breizhcamp 2012 was a very nice conference (200 attendees roughly) organized by Nicolas DeLoof and friends.

I had the opportunity to present XWiki and more specifically I did a demonstration of XWiki used as a web development platform to construct a possible Breizhcamp 2013 web site, featuring the ability to register talks and speakers, and automatically generate a session calendar based on the entered talks. Ability to see all speaker avatars and to search for sessions. Also demonstrated how to apply a Boostrap-based skin to make the site look like a web site.

I also had some fun showing how to import Gravatars automatically using a Groovy Script.

In addition I also got to record a live LesCastCodeurs episode.

Well done to Nicolas and all who helped organize this event. It was very nice and I'll happily come back next year (especially if the website is done using XWiki ).

Here are some screenshots of the result.

Conference home page demo with default XWiki Skin

Creation of the application to register Talks

Registration of Talks

Edition of a Talk

Conference home page demo with the Lyrebird Skin (bootstrap-based)

Calendar generated automatically by the registered Talks
(Technically a wiki page is created to generate JSON with some Groovy scripting on the XWiki Model, this JSON is then used as input for the Javascript Calendar)

Ability to search for Talks with a Livetable
(Note: The Lyrebird Skin used was missing some CSS for a nice Livetable styling)

Dynamic list of all speaker avatars

Last week I've presented 2 sessions at the Lausanne JUG (organized by Philippe Kernevez from OCTO Technology:

• XWiki: A web development runtime platform
• Developing XWiki

There were 20-30 people attending and I've had a lot of fun presenting. The evening was followed by a dinner with several attendees. I've had a very nice time! 

The presentation slides are available with voiceover and videos of demos on Parleys.com.

I'm just back from the What's Next Paris conference (26/27th May 2011) organized by Zenika. I was able to get a free entry as an OSSGTP member and a CastCodeurs. Thanks guys!

Zenika did a great job, especially for a first conference. It was located at the Grand Rex (a famous Theater in Paris, with a star-lit ceiling and where I remember seeing the first Stars Wars back in the 1970s...). Anyway very nice venue (imagine that it can fit more than 2700 people in the room!) even though the corridors were a bit cramped when everyone was out of the sessions.

The format of the event was risky with a single track which meant making compromises for choosing the talks. Must have been a nightmare for Zenika to choose the sessions...

I admit I didn't attend all sessions but he are some stuff that I liked and that resonated with me with what we're doing at XWiki:

• CloundFoundry. Seems to be a nice open PAAS: it's open source and you can plug stuff at all levels: new languages, services, and even plug your own infrastructure. Apparently it has this notion of Micro cloud which allows you to run it on your local computer which seems nice to try stuff out (I don't now how hard/easy it is to do that though, would need to research this a bit). In the XWiki project we've started some research exploration of running XWiki on PAAS (Google App Engine, etc). We're also lead on the Compatible ONE research project to create a PAAS that's a bridge to other existing PAAS, using a common API. As part of this we're also looking at running XWiki on a NoSQL storage.

• Orion. This is a Web IDE project lead by the Eclipse Foundation. Apparently it's quite recent and there's isn't much yet. The developers have focused on offering extension points/hooks so that the community can join and help out in offering services such as code analysis, code highlighting, etc. Right now a basic editor is provided with syntax highlighting for a few syntaxes and no autocompetion. They haven't tackled the issue of concurrent edition yet and are again waiting for community help on this. At XWiki, the concept of Web IDE is something dear to us since XWiki is a next generation wiki that lets you put script in wiki pages. Thus there's an important need to offer nice code editors. We also have another research project underway in which we're developing a realtime WYSIWYG solution. We had a first version of realtime editing done in the past (and using the WOOT algorithm - WithOut Operational Transformation, an algorithm close to the OT one used by Google Wave) in another research project but it didn't get into the product in the end because of some technical blocker. We hope this new research project will be integrated this time, allowing XWiki users to collaboratively edit the same wiki page at the same time and in WYSIWYG mode. Note that we also have a working integration with SkyWriter (was named Bespin before).

• HTML5 WebSockets. The presentation was great and clearly explained why it's a vastly superior implementation over polling (several HTTP requests to the server asking for news) or long polling (keep the HTTP connection open). With WebSockets you contact the server over HTTP but with a reduced header and in the header you ask for an "upgrade". The Server needs to be WebSocket-aware and respond to the "upgrade". From then one a dual-direction TCP socket is established and the server can send data to the client without the client having to do any polling. We really need to start adding HTML5 feature in XWiki and make them available only for HTML5-enabled browsers (i.e. degrade to what we're currently doing for older browsers).

As usual I enjoyed seeing again my IT and Open Source friends (too many to list!).

So what's next for 2012?

A new year flies by and it's time to reflect on the past achievements done on the XWiki software in order to prepare for even more improvements for 2011 (see XWiki in 2009 to see what happened in 2009).

Releases

That's a grand total of 63 releases, which means more than 1 release per week average! Compared to last year we've increased substantially (we had 58 releases in 2009).

We can see that XEclipse and XWatch would need some love... volunteers are welcome

Committers

This year we've had 23 committers

• 15 committing on XWiki Platform, XWiki Enterprise and XWiki Enterprise Manager. Note that 1 committer (Asiri) is no longer active.
• 6 committing only in the Contrib module
• 2 committing only on Curriki

In 2009 we had 14 active committers on XWiki Platform, XWiki Enterprise and XWiki Enterprise Manager. Note that we've just committed Raluca as committer so we're starting 2011 with 15 active committers.

Here are some stats from Ohloh showing how contributors have evolved over time:

Commit Activity

Note that commits below excludes commits related to releases and are provided by SVNSearch.

These commits are only for XWiki Platform, XWiki Enterprise and XWiki Enterprise Manager.

4499 commits corresponds to 12 commits/day in 2010. Not bad, even though it's down from 2009, but a bit better than 2008.

Here are some stats from Ohloh showing how commits have evolved over time:

Top Committers

Top committers for 2010:

Data extracted from SVN Search:

Mailing List Activity

Data extracted from Markmail.

That's 8886 non jira/hudson/svn mails which means 24 mails per day on the users and devs mailing lists.

Issue Tracking

In 2010, we've fixed 1347 issues. That's close to 4 per day, not bad, even though it's less than in 2008 and 2009.

Lines of Code

Here are some stats from Ohloh showing how the code base has evolved over time:

I was very excited to attend the third edition of USI (the conference organised by OCTO Technology). The first year was awesome with guest speakers such as Michel Serres, Neil Armstrong, Eliyahu Goldratt (physicist and father of the theory of constraints) and a lot more. I was honored to present a talk on XWiki that year. The second year was no less exceptional with other wonderful speakers such as Joël de Rosnay, Albert Jacquard, Daniel Cohen and a wonderful jazzman named Eric Lewis. That time I did a session with Tugdual Grall from eXo Platform on Wiki vs CMS. 

So it was with trepidation that I was waiting for this third edition. And I wasn't disappointed! The new venue in the Bois de Boulogne was great with excellent food and a chic setting. I did a live podcast recording with the other CastCodeurs (Emmanuel and Guillaume since Antonio decided to go biking instead, shame on him ). It was our first live recording so I guess we have things to fine tune for the future but it was good and the room was packed. Thanks everyone for showing up. I attended several excellent talks, starting with Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail concept which I've reused at XWiki to explain how XWiki is a second generation wiki). Chris spoke about the economy of Free and how it changes the game (I recommend his book). 

However the best talk for me was without question the one from Juan Enriquez. Juan was part of the team that sequenced the Human Genome and more recently he participated in creating the first artificial life. They were able to take an existing cell, remove all its nuclear material (DNA, etc) and inject some DNA constructed from a computer program. Once the cell was booted with this code, it started executing it, producing proteins as defined in the new DNA! At some point, Juan looked at the audience, filled with developers, and told us that we were the future, that we were going to be the kings of the future since we have the knowledge required. He said that his team had opened up a new playground for us, basically transforming a domain that was that of biology to information technology. Imagine the possibilities that this opens up! It's mindblowing. I think we also got out of this session completely jazzed up, full of energy, thinking about this potential future that we're not fully grasping yet. Personally this was a strong moment for me since I've always secretly dreamed of going back to the school benches to learn bioinformatic. I've never followed up on that dream but it tempts me even more now. I wish I could summon the courage to jump in the rabbit hole one day!

All in all, a great conference as usual where I was again happy to meet all the usual suspects: all my friends from OCTO and my open source friends. The conference ended with Fabrice Luchini, reading some extracts from Murray from his Theatre show and dazzling us with his verbal flow!