[xwiki-devs] XEM, Workspaces and Wiki3.0

Hi everybody, I am writing to the list in order to discuss an architectural choice which I had the chance to talk about with Vincent. In the framework of the Wiki3.0 [1] projects we are building a social extension of XWiki that will introduce social-oriented functionalities in the platform. One of these functionalities are related to "Workspaces" which have been defined as a "virtual place where a group of users can collaborate on a given topic. A workspace implicitly defines a social-network which consists of the users that participate to the activities in the context of a given workspace." A workspace, besides having a set of users subscribed to it, has also a set of applications that are related to the type of the interactions that are carried in the workspace itself (e.g., a blog, a meeting manager, etc.) This is the abstract picture. At the architectural level this could be implemented in different ways. What we briefly discussed with Vincent is that workspaces could be easily handled by using XEM. In this case, instead of having a mapping Workspace <-> space in a single Wiki we would have a Workspace <-> wiki in a multiwiki setup managed by XEM. This has several advantages since the current features can be already leveraged and extended in order to implement workspace functionalities: 1) existing applications are already ready-to-deploy 2) rights management is already enough to manage subscriptions 3) being a workspace a full wiki this gives the users more flexibility (e.g., they are not constrained to a single space for organizing their content) In this picture the main wiki could be used only as a "user container" and will have all the functionalities (UI + code) to manage workspaces' lifecycle (i.e., creation, deletion). Additional functionalities will the be present in the workspace wiki for actually managing the workspace (i.e., adding/removing members, subscription management for open workspaces, workspace attributes management and so on). Initially I haven't thought about workspaces as wikis in a XEM context by the idea is very powerful and I think we should build it in this way. WDYT? Thanks, -Fabio [1] https://wiki30.xwikisas.com