Hi, On Aug 21, 2009, at 8:26 PM, Alexandru Cismaru wrote: Actually the initial goal of XEclipse is to be a productivity tool so exactly what you describe for XWikiFox :) My vision is to make XEclipse also receive events and be available in the system tray and thus show notification popups when changes happen. Re whether both can exist or not, it's only going to be a matter of how many contributors/committers maintain them. If you're volunteering for maintaining XWikiFox on the long run then indeed it can exist for as long as you maintain it :) That said, it's a good question since we can ask ourselves whether joining forces wouldn't be better. Right now for example we don't have many people working on XEclipse unfortunately even though it's really promising. Another aspect is that XEclipse is written in java so it makes a bit easier to maintain and extend it (for example it's easy to integrate Thomas's remote events in it whereas it's more complex with XWikiFox since it's written in JS and listening to a jgroup channel in JS might not be as easy as in Java). Last aspect: not everyone is using FF and it's a pity that those who don't cannot access the XWikiFox features. They can use XEclipse though since it works everywhere. IMO we need to think about a direction for XWikiFox that wouldn't be the one that XEclipse is following. Let's see what others think. To finish, as I told you on IM, I really like the UI you've done and I think you've done a good job with XWikiFox. I blame myself for not having spendtenough time to think about it at the beginning of the SOC project and playing the joykiller. So don't be deterred by what I said and keep working on it to polish it. It's very promising :) Thanks for your work -Vincent

Hi Vincent & Alexandru, On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote: Yes. As Vincent stated it, as long as we have enough people to maintain both they can definitely coexist. To me, XEclipse is more geared towards developers while XWikiFox is interesting for wiki gardeners. Wiki gardeners want to get notifications when a page is modified on one of the wikis they follow, quickly see what changed and rollback it if needed. Obviously, these features are still lacking from XWikiFox but it provides a good backend & UI for them. I think a FF extension is better than another piece of software for wiki gardeners since they're web power users (thus likely to have FF already) but not developers. They're accustomed to XWiki's web interface and when they click on a page they want to see it in their usual browser, not as a syntax representation in XEclipse (I know XEclipse allows you to see the rendered page but it's not really useful on small screens / non-dual-screens setups). Wiki gardeners don't necessarily need another piece of software running. For instance, we tell our corporate users who are going to be XWiki administrators to install Firefox since it provides a better user experience than IE, notably for the panel wizard. Having them install and use FF on a regular basis instead of their usual IE browser is already a big step forward. It would be hard to have them install one more piece of software (XEclipse) to do wiki monitoring. That's where I think XWikiFox has a role to play. I think there is at least 2 big differences between both tools: - XEclipse targets developers / people willing to learn and use wiki syntax - XWikiFox is tighly integrated with the browser and XWiki's web interface In the long run we need to wonder what XWiki's development platform will look like. Based on current trends, 2 options are possible: 1. the XWiki Development toolkit is a powerful Eclipse extension, also available standalone 2. the XWiki Development toolkit is fully integrated to the web version of the product using Bespin and its collaboration features If 2) comes true, XWikiFox might become a way for the development toolkit to do the things that can't be done online (notifications, manage multiple wikis, persistent state storage) I'm don't think both pieces of software are addressing the same use case right now. However, we might considering joining forces the day we decide that the XWiki development toolkit goes fully browser-based (it will happen at one point anyway, it's only a matter of time). Another aspect is that XEclipse is written in java so it makes a bit I'm wondering what you mean here... Last time I checked Firefox was a cross-platform application too, thus XWikiFox "works everywhere" too if you're referring to the underlying OS platform. Not everyone is using Eclipse as their primary development tool either and you could consider Eclipse as a platform in the sense Firefox is one. Though you're right, the actual equivalent of XEclipse would be XWikiFox mounted on a standalone Prism version of Firefox and we don't have that yet (even is Sergiu would like it ;-) IMO we need to think about a direction for XWikiFox that wouldn't be I've described what I thought about the matter above :-) To summarize: 1. Short term 1. XWikiFox for wiki gardeners 2. XEclipse for developers 2. Long term 1. All XWiki development done through the web interface 2. XWikiFox as an extension / notification tool I'm using FF 3.5 and the UI looks weird (items in the list on the left are not aligned, see http://gsoc.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/download/XWiki+Widget+and+Firefox+extensi… ), not sure what might cause this. I should also have been spending more time working with you on the project but the summer went too fast... Sorry about that. And well, you could have spent more time asking questions and interacting on the lists too ;-) Keep up the good work! Guillaume -- Guillaume Lerouge Product Manager - XWiki Skype: wikibc Twitter: glerouge http://guillaumelerouge.com/