An unorthodox way of developing with Xwiki

[François Déchelle]

Hi,

I'm currently working on the development of a portal based on Xwiki, and 
may be what I am using to deploy groovy code could be helpfull.

You can find the code at:
https://protactinium.pps.jussieu.fr:12345/websvn/listing.php?repname=EDOS&path=%2Fsoftware%2Fqa%2Fqa-portal%2F#_software_qa_qa-portal_

The whole stuff is based on autotools (automake/autoconf) and curl.

The very simple configure script builds a property file that stores the 
Xwiki server name, port, username, password. There are then bash scripts 
that use 'curl' for login in, uploading and downloading Xwiki pages. The 
pages are stored as plain text files with .xwiki extension.

I edit the pages using emacs and groovy-mode (syntax coloring, 
indentation, parenthesis checking...). The groovy-mode Emacs lisp file 
can be found on http://groovy.codehaus.org/Emacs+Plugin

Once the pages edited and saved in emacs, I upload them in Xwiki using 
'make upload' and test them using firefox. This can of course be done 
directly from Emacs with M-compile.

Thanks to the fact that automake/autoconf support running configure in a 
different directory than the sources (i.e. the Xwiki documents), I can 
deploy simultaneously on 2 Xwikis, one running localy where I test the 
code, and another one running a more stable version. This is done by 
creating 2 'build' directories and running configure with 
--srcdir=SRCDIR argument.

I know it is not in any case the standard way of developing in Xwiki, 
but I find it helpfull. If it can be of any help...

A question now: is it possible to define Xwiki classes the same way? 
Right now, I define my classes using the web interface, but if I am 
curious to know if it is possible to do it textually?

François