Groovy and XWiki
The more I use a wiki at my day job the more I come to rely on it. I have found it to be an outstanding documentation and note-taking tool. At work I installed the Moin Moin Wiki which myself and two other developers contribute to regularly now. We are using version 1.6.something and have been happy with it.
I recently installed a new kind of wiki at home. XWiki, the self-proclaimed second generation wiki, is more than just a wiki. XWiki adds the very desirable capability to add two kinds of scripting languages directly into the wiki pages: Groovy and Vortex. This capability could allow you to write quick-and-dirty web applications directly in the wiki. It’s all object oriented and runs on a JEE back end.
In my brief encounter with XWiki so far the most exciting part is the Groovy support. Groovy seems to be exciting lots of Java developers and I’m one of them. XWiki also has a very flexible and, so the XWiki developers say, an enterprise ready wiki architecture.
The major problem I see with XWiki’s Groovy support is that the code is embedded directly in the wiki pages. At first glance this seems to be bad form when I think of all the “best practices” I’m always attempting to digest and use.
I’ll have to investigate more to see how this all plays out. Let me know your opinion if you have some experience with XWiki.
innovationstartups said,
December 24, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Is xwiki opensource? can it be integrated into a grails application????
thewonggei said,
December 25, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Absolutely, XWiki is an open source product. It is distributed under the LGPL License version 2.1. As for integration with Grails, it probably depends on the level of integration you are seeking. While XWiki pages can contain Groovy in them, the base of XWiki is written in Java. All XWiki requires to run is a database and a servlet container (such as Apache Tomcat). Therefore, you could simply download the XWiki WAR file and run it right along side your Grails app. Depending on what you want to do, I think you could easily mix scripts on the XWiki pages with the functionality of your Grails app to accomplish your goal.
innovationstartups said,
December 24, 2008 at 7:03 pm
is there a grails wiki plugin ?
thewonggei said,
December 25, 2008 at 1:57 pm
A quick search for “Grails” on http://www.xwiki.org did not return any results.