[xwiki-devs] FOSDEM Feedback

Hi, We were 9 xwikiers at FOSDEM this week-end and I wanted to take the occasion to give some feedback on what I saw there. The Community Dev Room ----------------------------------------- First XWikiers participated in the devroom co-organized by Sergiu: "Community Development and Marketing". The great news is that the room was full quite a big amount of the time. It was not a huge room but well placed (in the "original" area of FOSDEM which is still quite active). I think it shows more and more interest of people for this subjects which are less usual at FOSDEM which is very technological. Kudos to Sergiu for co-organizing this dev room. There was also a keynote from Kohsuke Kawaguchi (creator of jenkins) on how the jenkins community was build which was on a similar subject as the dev room (I'll give some feedback on the talk below). Sergiu has a presentation about "how to cope with a proliferation of tools in your community" which presented how XWiki can be used to be a portal to all the contents of all the tools you have in your community (aka "the dev flavor). The content of the talk was great but to my taste it was really missing screenshots to show practically what happens. There was a mini demo at the end but it was not enough to really make people realize how great xwiki.org is :) But the idea of the presentation is great and if we can spend a bit of time to not necessarly make the flavor, but publish the different pieces of xwiki.org as extensions, including some simple macros we are using (like how we integrate nabble). There was the 1M$ question of if we can migrate existing wikis to which we could have answered a bit better as we do have a few migrators for some specific wikis (Mediawiki, dokuwiki) but nothing fully done and fully generic. This is another area were we could spend some time making some specific migrators easier to use. If there are any contributors that would like to help out improving and publishing the migrators and "dev extensions" on extension.xwiki.org as well as document how other communities could use our tools, it would be very useful to help spread the XWiki work out there. Sergiu should publish his slides and maybe somebody can improve them with screenshots. Vincent and myself had a "devil (business) and angel (open source)" presentation on "Combining Open Source ethics with private interests". 20 minutes was a bit short to cover this subject fully in details but it was great to be able to share our experience on this. The room was quite full when we did this presentation and there were a few questions which I believe showed the interest of participants with this subject. Vincent will publish the slides although it's not easy to follow without the additional "talking". We should definitively try to do this again. MySQL and Security ------------------------------ I attended a few MySQL presentations as well as some security presentations. There seems to be some interesting improvements in InnoDB in MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 (currently RC) and even MariaDB and Percona have some work that improve InnoDB (with XTraDB). As we are planning to work on performance we should look into testing how XWiki behaves on MySQL 5.1 to 5.6 and compare the performance also with Postgres. In any case we should follow what is happening in this area. On security there was a presentation about OWASP ZAP ( https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Zed_Attack_Proxy_Project) and attack proxy to test the security of Web Applications. This is something to look at for the Thomas D's coming work on security. Kohshuke presentation on Jenkins community ------------------------------------------------------------------- On the "community" subject there was interesting presentations about "how to cope with assholes in your community" and the presentation of Kohshuke. To summarize very quickly while Kohshuke says part of the big reasons why jenkins has been succesful is "good software" and "being there at the right time" he would like to believe that the way the community is run and the software is architectured has a lot to do with this success. Some important items: - small core with apis, many extensions, extensions are "first-class citizens" of jenkins - very extensible - very open to contribute an extension with almost automatic commit right (with an IRC bot to get a rights) What we can learn for XWiki ----------------------------------------- There are a few things to learn here for XWiki I believe: XWiki has a lot of what is said here, particularly the extensibility but we could "finish" things a bit more with these learnings in mind. XWiki is very extensible in many areas (but not all, like the old core). It is very easy to publish an extension, particularly a XAR file on extensions.xwiki.org and we have extension manager to install this extension. However there are a few things we can do better: 1/ On the java side, contributing is still difficult. The core is still big and not well defined. In the "platform" repository we have many different things, including modules that are not vital to the XWiki core and that could be maintained by contributors. Our development rules and methodologies are very "strict" when it comes to the "platform", "commons" or "rendering" and since many many things are published there it's not easy to participate there. If we separated a bit the "real core" from the additional modules that depend on the core apis but are not as critical to the core, and we move the additional modules to an area with potentially less stricts rules of development and where each developer can decide his own rules, maybe we would greatly improve potential contributions. It's also a question of how we "consider" the extensions and we publish information about them and recognize them when they end up in the default install. More on this below. 2/ On the xar/scripting side, it's "almost" easy to publish something and make it available thanks to EM but there are a few quirks that we need to solve: - Exporting a XAR is not fully supported by the core (we need Admin Tools and it's not enough documented). - Committing your work is not easy which makes it more complicated to get contributors to extend an existing extension. But the good news is that we are quite close: - AppWithinMinutes has an extension to publish an application on Extension Repository - SVN and GitHub app allow to commit XWiki pages - Maven allows to build and release an XWiki app - Admin Tools has ways to export multiple pages - XEM code has an "Application Descriptor" which could be useful for not AWM code If we bind all these together a bit more we can have a killer. Let's image the following: 1/ In an admin area you go to "Extensions" and you have a button to "create a local extension" and can add XWiki pages to your extension which would add your pages to an "Extension descriptor" 2/ AWM would automatically use this extension descriptor. 3/ You would have a way to: - ask for a git repository for your extension - commit your extension from XWiki - release your extension from XWiki and publish it on extensions.xwiki.org - allow another user to install this extension using EM and then decide to fork it, modify it and commit the changes and create a pull request for the changes - finish the contribution loop 4/ On extensions.xwiki.org you could see who the contributors are for the extension and what they committed. Then you have an even more powerful way to contribute to XWiki, wether it is an AWM application or just a snippet of code. Aside from that we should make it a bit easier through documentation or tools mainly) to publish java code as it is still slightly complicated to make it easily installed using EM. More important even would be to continue improving AWM to make it easier to add Javascript, CSS or REST apis to an application but this is another story for more complex applications. This is food for thoughts to allow XWiki to get more help from new committers which is a great solution to help XWiki spread more. On the spreading subject, I also think we should make more effort to publish some "mashup" macros or snippets and publish them both on extensions.xwiki.orgas well on the other projects extensions or plugins pages. This would help show how easy it is to integrate XWiki with other tools. I was quite happy with this year's FOSDEM. It's getting more and more interesting. Open Source is alive and kicking. We could push for happing a "Web Application Dev Room" (we tried to get a "wiki one"), as there is not much on this subject. There was a "web development" track but it was a bit empty. Maybe this is an area to work on to get Wikis, CMS tools, Web and Javascript frameworks presented. Ludovic -- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost