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.