[xwiki-users] Converting from XWiki to TWiki

[Ludovic Dubost]

Paul,

I am myself dismayed about your attitude and your lack of respect of 
Open Source developers.
You might be one of these people that like Open Source much more because 
it's free and because you can dig into other's people knowledge and 
creations at will than because you can participate and help enhance and 
improve it.

I'm really sorry that you lack of implication (although you have been 
following the users and developers list since you have got 7 of your 
questions answered without having help answer to any of the other's 
users questions) have made you not notive that despite what you think 
XWiki has made a lot of progress.

You would have seen that there is an XWiki 0.9.1252 which has many 
improved features like:
  - TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor compatible with the XWiki syntax done 
by a Google Summer of Code student
  - Backlinks support
  - Improved API with write-API and many new functions helping write web 
sites
  - A charting Wizard done by a Google Summer of Code student
  - Multi Wiki support like no other wiki
  - An XPath based Query language done by a Google Summe of Code student
  - A cluster mode contributed by TripAdvisor.com
 
You would also have seen that a Google Summer of Code is in the works with:

 - Support JCR for storage with a migration path from hibernate database 
storage
 - A AJAX form editor
 - A new XWiki 1.0 skin implementing the Usability recommandations 
worked on last year
 - A P2P Replication protocol allowing to work Offline and run XWiki on 
multiple servers

It's sad that you haven't seen that we are trying hard to build a long 
lasting Open Source Wiki able to tackle tomorrow's Wiki challenges. And 
this not only takes code, documentation, but also the ability to invest 
steadily in XWiki. I've personnally spent 2 years without any salary 
working on XWiki as I created my own company. Thanks to users and 
companies that better understand Open Source and our approach than you 
do, we now have been able to hire close to 10 people to work on XWiki 
and on projects based on XWiki. Close to 40 companies have trusted our 
services to ask us to help them build solutions on top of XWiki. 
Hundreds of companies are using XWiki for free. XWiki has been selected 
for France State funded research project on Collaboration on P2P and 
Mobility environements.

Also it's funny that I've received the same day as your email 
congratulations and credits from  the Sibelius-Academy in Finland which 
has been using XWiki for the Music History Web  Site 
(http://muhi.siba.fi/ -> it's in Finnish). Apparently they have been 
able to tweak the XWiki look and feel better than you did.

I'm mainly sorry for you that you don't realize that Open Source 
development means tons of hours of hard work shared with a community 
which of course is free to use it or to use something else. But I tend 
to believe that the minimum that users of Open Source software should 
have is respect for developers sharing their work with a community. I 
just hope that you will learn this while joining the TWiki community 
which I have a lot of respect for as I've been using and contributing to 
TWiki for 3 years before writing XWiki.

We'll take the positive out of your nasty email, which I'm sure is due 
to frustration at not finding what you needed from XWiki (a free lunch 
?). We'll try to learn from it to improve our documentation, developer 
guides (anybody wanting to help ?), our code quality and architecture.

I realize that this email might sound a little aggressive towards you, 
but sometimes it's good to set things straight.

Good luck for you in the future. I just hope you'll be a better user and 
contributor of TWiki.

Ludovic

Paul Dlug a écrit :
> We just completed a conversion from XWiki to TWiki because of the 
> numerous limitations of XWiki (really awful to understand permissions 
> system, slow pace of development, lack of plugins, horrid look and 
> feel, etc.). We initially tried to convert the syntax to TWiki using 
> perl with Parse::RecDescent. Since the grammar is rather unstructured 
> and regex/exception based this isn't an easy thing to do. We were 
> successfully in hacking up a version of XWiki/Radeox that outputs the 
> XWIki syntax as TWiki syntax. Since this uses the native structures 
> inside the original java code the conversion is much cleaner.
>
> If anyone else is migrating from XWiki to TWiki let me know if you'd 
> like the code to batch convert the whole wiki at once. I'm happy to 
> save others the pain of doing this themselves.
>
> As an aside, I am dismayed at the slow progress of XWiki in the time 
> we have been using it (over a year and a half). I was also quite 
> appalled when I started digging into the code to this, it's messy, 
> undocumented, and rife with duplicate logic.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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-- 
Ludovic Dubost
XPertNet: http://www.xpertnet.fr/
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Skype: ldubost AIM: nvludo Yahoo: ludovic