In case you're wondering, this site is running on a new wiki platform that Christian has developed over the last few months. We'll use this wiki for the new seamframework.org site and, eventually, port hibernate.org across. For now, this blog is a perfect way to validate the content and plugin architecture and test the overall stability of the platform.
(Yeah, I know the site was crawling yesterday, hopefully this problem will be resolved soon, we'll see...)
Every page on this website is a wiki page, and was produced by writing wiki text. The only reason you see this content as a blog is that Christian has developed a set of plugins that may be used to aggregate and embed content within the surrounding Seam Text content.
For example, the Seam Text source of my blog home page is:
[<=hideCreatorHistory]
[<=clearBackground]
<div style="float:right; width:29%;">
<div>[<=userProfile]</div>
<div style="margin-top:15px;">[<=blogRecentEntries]</div>
<div style="margin-top:15px;">[<=blogArchive]</div>
<div class="box" style="margin-top:15px;">
<div class="boxHeader">My Links</div>
<div class="boxContent">
[Hibernate=>http://www.hibernate.org]
<br/>
[Seam=>http://www.jboss.com/products/seam]
<br/>
[My Photo Blog=>http://gavin-king.blogspot.com]
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="width:70%;">[<=blogDirectory]</div>
So why are we wasting our time building wikis and blogs when we could be doing real work? Well, first, it gives us a good way to explore the limits of our chosen application framework. (Mmmmm, dogfood...) Second, it is frankly embarrassing that major Java framework sites like hibernate.org and springframework.org don't run on Java! jboss.org /does/ run on Java (and JBoss) but to be honest we're simply not satisfied with the legacy-ish infrastructure that is available there at this time.
Nor are we satisfied with any of the other open source Java-based wiki's out there. This is partly because our needs go beyond a pure wiki engine. We need the platform to also support a blog, discussion forum and knowledge base, with a uniform interface for all of the following concerns:
- user registration and administration
- content creation and editing
- content versioning and diffing
- syndication
- permissioning
- tagging
- attachments
- preferences management
- search
Much of this infrastructure is already in place. But we do have a few more items to go before we can start work on seamframework.org. Top of my list are:
- A forum plugin, which would aggregate content as a forum thread, just as the blog plugins aggregate content as a blog
- A knowledge base plugin, to aggregate content as FAQ page
- Support for tagging, in addition to the existing heirarchical organization of content
- The ability to easily move pages between directories
- a plugin for syndicating external Atom feeds onto the wiki
- Help
- Internationalization
- A plugin for opinion polls (just for fun!)
Hi, a little off topic, your current font you use in the blog is pretty bad on eyes since it is italic and not well anti aliased (i am using firefox- windows xp). i would suggest using a better font. Possibly Georgia is a good choice. Also system is doing some stuff while writing comments, i did not understand well. Regards.
Great idea to combine a Wiki and a Blog. So how does that work? Are those separate parts of the website or is it one system where you can define that particular pages are wiki pages and other blog entries?
It is also very smart to develop an application with your own framework. That way you are staying closer to the real world, where you framework should do it's job.
But why did you guys develop Seam Text? There are a lot of markup languages out there? Why didn't you use one of them?
I don't think there is any italic fonts left on the site, I removed all of them in the stylesheet more than a week ago. Windows platforms have indeed an issue with Lucida Sans in italic. If you find any italic fonts you can't read, send me the URL.
Any directory full of wiki pages can be a . All you need to do is define a page for the directory that embeds the blog plugin.
Some people in the Nuxeo community, which notoriously uses Seam for its web front-end, are asking for an integrated Wiki.
See this message for instance.
Do you believe there is a chance that your wiki could be reused in the Nuxeo project?
J.
It is a great idea. The more big things running Seam, the better (Nuxeo is the biggest thing I'm aware of). Out of curiosity, will it be open sourced?
@Christian: apparently my Firefox has some issues, it looks fine in other computers. but strangely the issue persist on my system. One more comment, instead of double digit math question verification question, you can do single digit
If it's just the wiki text parser that they need, they can definitely re-use it, since it is part of Seam. To re-use the whole plugin architecture might be more difficult right now, but we do plan to eventually productize the wiki plugin engine as an addon to Seam.
It already is. Check examples/wiki in the Seam2 distribution.
Two things that are funny here.
First, you took the words right out of my damn mouth about eating the Java dog chow. It drives me nuts when I see Java developers blogging their hearts out on a WordPress site. Bravo to you guys. I'm one to talk as I still have f*#king Moveable Type running (blah!), but hopefully I will roll that over soon enough.
I was curious about the availability of the software as well. Stupid me was looking at the examples/blog instead of examples/wiki. Who knew?
Hi,
Great work. Dogfood is always a rewarding experience :D Do you intend to engage in development of a full blown CMS?
I agree on the lack of Java based wikis in specific and content management systems in general. Especially if you contrast it with what's available in the PHP world. There are some promising CMS frameworks on which it's possible to base a decent consumer-ready CMS (e.g. Magnolia, Liferay, Alfresco and so on) but no fully equipped CMS product. Such a thing should definitely include a good wiki, blog(s) and forums.
I'd add to your list of requirements a comments management module (not necessarily a full blown rating machine a-la Digg) and a workflow for satisfying publishing scenarios. And that leads me to a question...
How does Seam Text (and indeed, Seam itself) relate to JBoss Portal? I may be mistaken, but as far as I know JBoss Portal is not using Seam. Are there any plans to integrate Seam into it? Would the Portal benefit from it? What, if anything, would be gained by such a change (apart from giving you even further opportunity to enjoy premium dogfood)?
I'll link to Munwar Shariff's presentation from JBoss World 2006. A good discussion of the benefits (and details) of integrating jBPM into JBoss Portal. I imagine Seam would come into play nicely given an existing BPM integration.
On another topic - I really like the Seam Text markup, Nice and succinct. Syntax highlighting could be a nice cherry on top, it's a geeky world after all. Not sure though how well existing libraries handle Java 5 syntax.
Ophir
No, the goal is not content management as such. As you point out there are a number of good projects addressing this space (including Nuxeo, which is based on Seam). We don't need a full workflow system to satisfy our requirements.
These are questions we will be asking ourselves in the near future.
Yes, That's a great idea. I will look into it.
Hi,
I've been using XWiki for some time now. It's a wiki software, it's Java-based, it's Open-Source and it has most (if not all) of the features you listed above (tags, attachments, FAQ...), including a blog. XWiki actually is a development platform as well as a full-featured wiki software (you can create new applications in minutes) and it can be extended easily through plugins. You can use script languages such as Velocity and Groovy within wiki pages.
I'd be glad to know whether you gave it a try before starting the development of your own piece of wiki software. Did you find some shortcomings that made it unsuitable for your needs?
About the CMS part, XWiki can perfectly well be used as an easy publication tool. You can define page templates (typically a blog article, a reference, a FAQ question...) and let users add new pages of that kind in one click. So it could be a good start for someone willing to build a full-fledged Java CMS software :-)
I'd be happy to know what you all think about the comparison between both pieces of software as I think they are trying to address the same concerns on quite a number of points. Thought I might be wrong...
Guillaume
It's not build on Seam. Seriously, this is not only about building the frameworks own website with the framework, but many small and even some major bugs were discovered while writing this application. It's also about validation of the work we have been doing on Seam. So no, XWiki wasn't even considered, nor was any other similar software.
When/where can we get the source? ;D
See this entry at the bottom: More on the wiki road map
I'd recommend not deploying it right now as long as we are having the current problems with the production site. I think I found the reason now but I still need to commit some changes. On the other hand, looking at the code won't hurt :)
I've found the problem with xwiki to be security. Attachments sometimes mean files, and the way xwiki handles them leaves a little to be desired in my opinion.
I don't think this is correct. xwiki security is pretty good in my opinion.