4 Feb
2013
4 Feb
'13
2:02 p.m.
I don't think there is video though for the dev rooms. Only for the main
presentations.
Ludovic
2013/2/4 Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) <valicac(a)gmail.com>
Hi Ludo,
Thank for your notes on the FOSDEM talks. Would be great to have the slides
presented and also I'm gonna link the presentations' pages because I guess
they will show the recordings when the videos are gonna be made available:
Coping with the proliferation of tools within your community
https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/coping_with_the_proliferation/
Combining Open Source ethics with private interests
https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/event/combining_open_source_ethics/
Our strength is our extensibility and making it more easy to create,
collaborate and distribute extensions inside and with XWiki will be a great
thing.
Thanks,
Caty
On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Ludovic Dubost <ludovic(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
--
Ludovic Dubost
Founder and CEO
Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/
XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com
Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
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
_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs(a)xwiki.org
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
_______________________________________________
devs mailing list
devs(a)xwiki.org
http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs