Can’t find a decent open source java based wiki


Written on January 7, 2008 – 12:00 am | by mpayne

I admit, early on in the process, the bar was set pretty high with Jive’s Clearspace. Honestly I think it is awesome. Great layout, multiple wiki spaces, personal blogs, forums, polls, LDAP authenication and killer intergation with openfire chat server.

However Clearspace is not open source and its pricing is out of reach at this point in time. I am trying to introduce the wiki as a pilot to a techie and non techie work enviroment. (Maybe at a little point in time)

Look little at JSPWiki, overall I thought it was a little raw for a non-techie corporate enviroment.

XWiki seemed a little better in terms of features. I like the fact individual users can have their own blogs.
It also seems to have the concept of a discussion forum.
I wish it had more than one theme.
Its overall all look and feel is unpolished in some areas and acceptable in others. There are some very good features that are by default not obvious to the overall navigation.

The deal breaker is XWiki is "slop". Its not packaged together with care, just slopped together. This becomes obvious with one look at the WEB-INF\lib directory in recent downloadable .war archives.

Half of the jars is that directory are not need.
I am not intimate with the code, but just glancing the surface the following are build time only jars

  • ant-1.6.5.jar
  • ant-1.7.0.jar
  • ant-launcher-1.7.0.jar
  • antlr-2.7.6rc1.jar
  • jmock-1.0.1.jar
  • junit-3.8.1.jar
  • jtidy-8.0-20060801.131059-3-dev.jar

After that, there are two caching implementations ehcache-1.1.jar, oscache-2.3.2-xwiki.jar.
XML api’s appear rundant as well re: jdom AND dom4j.
Pick one
It uses hibernate for persistance so I imagine not oe ever cleaned out what hibernate shipped with vs. what you actually need for your implementation.

Hopefully someone cleans this up, I was considering XWiki, but in its current form, it leaves the impression that it wasn’t packaged with care.

I am open to other suggestions. Perhaps even outside the java area. Deki is a consideration, its clean but would perfer that the wiki also allow individuals to have their personal blog/journals.

  1. 9 Responses to “Can’t find a decent open source java based wiki”

  2. By anon on Jan 7, 2008 | Reply

    Give JAMWiki a try: http://jamwiki.org/wiki/en/StartingPoints

  3. By Anders Monrad on Jan 7, 2008 | Reply

    Have a look af http://www.jamwiki.org. Java based mediawiki clone.

  4. By anon on Jan 7, 2008 | Reply

    Heh, I should have refreshed the comments page before making my post. Anders beat me to it.

  5. By Nice guy on Jan 8, 2008 | Reply

    jamwiki

  6. By Vincent Massol on Jan 8, 2008 | Reply

    Hi there,

    Thanks for your blog post about XWiki. I’m one of the developers.

    I believe several of the jars (the junit ones) are being included transitively by some badly packaged dependencies (we’re using Maven to package XWiki). That isn’t an excuse since we can exclude them.

    Now if I were you I would evaluate XWiki on how well it performs for the task at hand. OTOH if you’re a developer and you want to dive in the code, you’ll find the XWiki community very open to suggestions and help. You can get in touch with us on IRC or on the mailing list.

    We’re currently busy releasing XWiki Enterprise 1.2 but I’ll work on your issues for version 1.3.

    http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-1645

    Thanks again for your help!
    -Vincent

  7. By Matt P on Jan 8, 2008 | Reply

    Thank for checking Vincent.
    Thats great you are using maven.

    I believe you can update the scope to say “test” for build type dependencies.


    junit
    junit
    [3.8.2,)
    test

    Matt

  8. By Vincent Massol on Jan 9, 2008 | Reply

    Matt,

    It’s not a problem with XWiki… But with transitive dependencies which are wrong… :) So we need to explicitely use an exclude for these jars.

    Again it’s not that we don’t know how to do it. We just need to find the time to do it. I’m releasing XWiki Enterprise 1.2 RC3 today and then I can start fixing that.

    Thanks for answering :)
    -Vincent

  9. By a. coward on Jan 11, 2008 | Reply

    Maybe give VQWiki a try at http://www.vqwiki.org/ ?

  10. By Vincent Massol on Jan 11, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Matt,

    I’ve fixed the junit and mockobjects deps in the build. I was correct and their were coming from transitive deps which had wrong compile time dependencies specified on junit (instead of test scopes).

    All the other jars you mention are required at runtime.

    The only thing that I still need to solve is the duplicate Ant jar (in 2 different versions).

    I’ll do that in a few days.

    Thanks
    -Vincent

Post a Comment