[xwiki-devs] Improving the XWiki Development environment for traditional Java/JS Developers
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties: - they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer: - easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at: 1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files. Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it. The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync" Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages. 2/ Integration with Eclipse Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor. Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs. The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project. Live syntax checking could be provided. 3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki. Live syntax checking could be provided. Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline. Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult. Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser. Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform. Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css. WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising. Ludovic -- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
Hi ludovic, All good points that I think all of us would like to see addressed as well. Replies inline. On Jun 29, 2013, at 11:41 AM, Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]> wrote:
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion
Note that Edy and myself created an autcompletion extension last year but we didn't get to publish it on e.x.o (it's here ATM: https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-editor-devtools). I'm planning to continue and finish it this year during the coming hackathon in July.
- they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
Various comments: * I've always been a big fan of XEclipse but it seems I've been the only one. Whenever I've proposed to work on it and proposed ideas about it I was told that it's not the future and the future is developing in the IDE using javascript. While this is probably true, I don't see it happening with the same ease as your current standalone IDE before 5 years at least. * Your point 1) about exposing the XWiki model on the file system so that any IDE can use it is what I've been working on for a long time. (albeit very slowly). This is one of the reason I'm working on the new model, so that I can develop a file-based implementation. Note that I've just started developing one using Git as the backend in a branch and I've defined a way to map the XWiki model to a filesystem. I'll create a page on the Design space of dev.xwiki.org with what I have so far so that we can discuss it. * Existing WebIDE solutions are too early IMO. BTW exoIDE is a no go since it handles the storage too using JCR and you cannot use it as a library. It would be good to have someone research the state of open source WebIDE (with compatible licenses) hat can be used a libraries but I fear that we won't find much. So I see 3 steps: * 1) Finish the syntax highlighting and autocompletion extension and publish it. Then include it in the platform if other devs agree * 2) Build on top of XEclipse to bring it to the next level * 3) In // we continue working on the new model Now you point 1) is interesting but is not easy to implement. Basically it means implementing a VFS (Virtual File System) for the IDE. All IDEs have a VFS so it's just about having an implementation that takes its data from a remote XWiki server using REST but it might be slow and will need a lot of caching and thus sync, which we need anyway for offline editing features (and is currently implemented in XEclipse). Thus the XEclpse way is the easiest for short term progress on this IMO. I also think XEclipse could be seen as an admin center (ie. perform admin tasks on several XWiki instances, monitor its health, etc), but that's another topic. Thanks -Vincent
Ludovic
2013/6/29 Vincent Massol <[email protected]>
Hi ludovic,
All good points that I think all of us would like to see addressed as well.
Replies inline.
On Jun 29, 2013, at 11:41 AM, Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]> wrote:
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion
Note that Edy and myself created an autcompletion extension last year but we didn't get to publish it on e.x.o (it's here ATM: https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-editor-devtools).
Cool. I did not know it had been published.
I'm planning to continue and finish it this year during the coming hackathon in July.
Yes this one is very important as it would help a lot newcomers. Note: the scripting reference documentation is usually very appreciated, but is not known to developers. In the same way, little developer know that they can install some extension to edit textarea fields in an outside editor (we should document them somewhere)
- they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
Various comments:
* I've always been a big fan of XEclipse but it seems I've been the only one. Whenever I've proposed to work on it and proposed ideas about it I was told that it's not the future and the future is developing in the IDE using javascript. While this is probably true, I don't see it happening with the same ease as your current standalone IDE before 5 years at least.
I still believe WebIDE is the future. However, I'm more and more convince that even if it's the future it will take more time for devs to switch. Therefore if we want to have developers adopt XWiki more we need to play nice and give them what they want.
* Your point 1) about exposing the XWiki model on the file system so that any IDE can use it is what I've been working on for a long time. (albeit very slowly). This is one of the reason I'm working on the new model, so that I can develop a file-based implementation. Note that I've just started developing one using Git as the backend in a branch and I've defined a way to map the XWiki model to a filesystem. I'll create a page on the Design space of dev.xwiki.org with what I have so far so that we can discuss it.
I don't agree that 1/ is what you mean, althout there are some similarities. I don't think that it's a good solution to have the developer set up their wiki with a git backend. We need to allow developers to work with any wiki install with as little modifications as possible. Additionally you could want to have the code on your computer, and the dev server on a remote server online. You could work on your code (though not test it) offline or temporarly with a local install until you decide to push your code to the online install. Now the similarity could be in the storage of the XWiki content in the File System. This is the big debate, and we should start it ASAP. What is the structure that this file system storage would get. Then it can be used by the maven build or by your FS storage or by the tool I'm thinking about which could push local content to XWiki. Right now I did space/page.xml space/page.properties (for translations files) space/page.xwiki (for other) space/page_classname_objectnumber_propertyname.js (for JS Extension) space/page_classname_objectnumber_propertyname.css (for Stylesheet Extension) space/page_classname_objectnumber_propertyname.properties (for UIExtension properties) space/page_classname_objectnumber_propertyname.xwiki (for other) space/page_classname_objectnumber_style.css (for skin fields) space/page_classname_objectnumber_view.vm (for skin fields) space/page_classname_attachmentname.ext (for attachments) Some custom decisions based on objects was needed to have custom extensions. Now we could use a special object for that, but this can be complicated if you have multiple textarea in one document. Currently pure velocity or groovy content is hard to detect as it often uses the {{groovy}} or {{velocity}} macro which is in the content. The drawback of this is that the xml files are quite in the way (although less used) but they are necessary. This naming scheme goes beyond just a file system view. It's also trying to make the files look more developer friendly.
* Existing WebIDE solutions are too early IMO. BTW exoIDE is a no go since it handles the storage too using JCR and you cannot use it as a library. It would be good to have someone research the state of open source WebIDE (with compatible licenses) hat can be used a libraries but I fear that we won't find much.
Orion from the Eclipse project could be interesting.
So I see 3 steps: * 1) Finish the syntax highlighting and autocompletion extension and publish it. Then include it in the platform if other devs agree
Yes but that's not enough
* 2) Build on top of XEclipse to bring it to the next level
This is not enough either. XEclipse is interesting but first it would have to be integrated in the Eclipse workbench and not a standalone tool. And even that it forces to use XEclipse.
* 3) In // we continue working on the new model
This is different than what I propose for 1/. It does not address 1/ at this point. I believe we need to address 1/
Now you point 1) is interesting but is not easy to implement. Basically it means implementing a VFS (Virtual File System) for the IDE. All IDEs have a VFS so it's just about having an implementation that takes its data from a remote XWiki server using REST but it might be slow and will need a lot of caching and thus sync, which we need anyway for offline editing features (and is currently implemented in XEclipse). Thus the XEclpse way is the easiest for short term progress on this IMO.
I don't think so. If we agree on a model to store the files in maven projects then we need: 0/ Agree on the file system model 1/ Implement the xar plugin changes to support the new storage and have xar:format allow to migrate to the new one 2/ In // work on a nice tool to manage the push/pull (which is what I started and made some progress) 3/ Evolve this tool towards a sync In Eclipse the task is different. It's about working on the tree view to make it more developer friendly and integrate in the workbench instead of being standalone.
I also think XEclipse could be seen as an admin center (ie. perform admin tasks on several XWiki instances, monitor its health, etc), but that's another topic.
Right now XEclipse is more a content admin tool, and this was a bit a fail because content admins are good with the browser. We missed the target. Ludovic
Thanks -Vincent
Ludovic
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
On Jun 29, 2013, at 1:04 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi ludovic,
All good points that I think all of us would like to see addressed as well.
Replies inline.
On Jun 29, 2013, at 11:41 AM, Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]> wrote:
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion
Note that Edy and myself created an autcompletion extension last year but we didn't get to publish it on e.x.o (it's here ATM: https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-editor-devtools).
I'm planning to continue and finish it this year during the coming hackathon in July.
- they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
Various comments:
* I've always been a big fan of XEclipse but it seems I've been the only one. Whenever I've proposed to work on it and proposed ideas about it I was told that it's not the future and the future is developing in the IDE using javascript. While this is probably true, I don't see it happening with the same ease as your current standalone IDE before 5 years at least.
On this topic of 5 years just seen this today: http://www.theserverside.com/feature/Cloud-based-IDEs-to-replace-desktop-dev... Thanks -Vincent
* Your point 1) about exposing the XWiki model on the file system so that any IDE can use it is what I've been working on for a long time. (albeit very slowly). This is one of the reason I'm working on the new model, so that I can develop a file-based implementation. Note that I've just started developing one using Git as the backend in a branch and I've defined a way to map the XWiki model to a filesystem. I'll create a page on the Design space of dev.xwiki.org with what I have so far so that we can discuss it.
* Existing WebIDE solutions are too early IMO. BTW exoIDE is a no go since it handles the storage too using JCR and you cannot use it as a library. It would be good to have someone research the state of open source WebIDE (with compatible licenses) hat can be used a libraries but I fear that we won't find much.
So I see 3 steps: * 1) Finish the syntax highlighting and autocompletion extension and publish it. Then include it in the platform if other devs agree * 2) Build on top of XEclipse to bring it to the next level * 3) In // we continue working on the new model
Now you point 1) is interesting but is not easy to implement. Basically it means implementing a VFS (Virtual File System) for the IDE. All IDEs have a VFS so it's just about having an implementation that takes its data from a remote XWiki server using REST but it might be slow and will need a lot of caching and thus sync, which we need anyway for offline editing features (and is currently implemented in XEclipse). Thus the XEclpse way is the easiest for short term progress on this IMO.
I also think XEclipse could be seen as an admin center (ie. perform admin tasks on several XWiki instances, monitor its health, etc), but that's another topic.
Thanks -Vincent
Ludovic
Making things easy for developers is quite interesting to me because I'm a developer and I like scratching my own itches. more inline: On 06/29/2013 05:41 AM, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
I actually implemented part of this for my own personal toolkit. I presented it on the list to great fanfair here: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/A-new-XWiki-Model-sort-of-td7585722.html I have the xar generation and push to XWiki in a 4 or 5 second post operation. The format is more makefile-esque so it's not really good for live sync but I have been using it and have not yet thrown it across the room which is a good indication that it's probably technologically sound.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
If we decide this is a priority, it's something which I could investigate and would be able to reuse experience and tools from the Resilience project.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
#1 can be many things. It could be as simple as my little .xar generator with ability to post to a live wiki. It could be as complex as an XWiki filesystem which you'd mount with nfs or something. If we commit to a directory structure, it is going to require a lot of thought to make that structure coherent and once we commit to it, we're kind of stuck with it. #3 is easy at first then it gets hard. We can pull in an editor and if we find an editor which supports ctags then we get completion for a reasonable price. The problem is ctags (and most editors) don't support velocity so if we want to autocomplete velocity we end up hacking something together and making a few demos then it's forgotten, or worse we write everything in-house to really support production ready velocity completion and then we're saddled with maintaining another 15k LoC that no other project has any interest in. http://ctags.sourceforge.net/languages.html If what we want is extensions then we should go after extensions directly. The fastest growing extension repository is npm, while it's smaller than maven or rubygems, it's getting new packages at almost twice the rate of maven, the next competitor. My recommendation is to move in the #1 direction but specifically targeting XWiki extensions by copying the npm workflow. Thanks, Caleb
Ludovic
oops "The fastest growing extension repository is npm, while it's smaller than maven or rubygems, it's getting new packages at almost twice the rate of maven, the next competitor" [citation needed] http://modulecounts.com/ Thanks, Caleb On 06/29/2013 04:41 PM, Caleb James DeLisle wrote:
Making things easy for developers is quite interesting to me because I'm a developer and I like scratching my own itches.
more inline:
On 06/29/2013 05:41 AM, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
I actually implemented part of this for my own personal toolkit. I presented it on the list to great fanfair here: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/A-new-XWiki-Model-sort-of-td7585722.html
I have the xar generation and push to XWiki in a 4 or 5 second post operation. The format is more makefile-esque so it's not really good for live sync but I have been using it and have not yet thrown it across the room which is a good indication that it's probably technologically sound.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
If we decide this is a priority, it's something which I could investigate and would be able to reuse experience and tools from the Resilience project.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
#1 can be many things. It could be as simple as my little .xar generator with ability to post to a live wiki. It could be as complex as an XWiki filesystem which you'd mount with nfs or something. If we commit to a directory structure, it is going to require a lot of thought to make that structure coherent and once we commit to it, we're kind of stuck with it.
#3 is easy at first then it gets hard. We can pull in an editor and if we find an editor which supports ctags then we get completion for a reasonable price. The problem is ctags (and most editors) don't support velocity so if we want to autocomplete velocity we end up hacking something together and making a few demos then it's forgotten, or worse we write everything in-house to really support production ready velocity completion and then we're saddled with maintaining another 15k LoC that no other project has any interest in. http://ctags.sourceforge.net/languages.html
If what we want is extensions then we should go after extensions directly. The fastest growing extension repository is npm, while it's smaller than maven or rubygems, it's getting new packages at almost twice the rate of maven, the next competitor. My recommendation is to move in the #1 direction but specifically targeting XWiki extensions by copying the npm workflow.
Thanks, Caleb
Ludovic
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
2013/6/29 Caleb James DeLisle <[email protected]>
Making things easy for developers is quite interesting to me because I'm a developer and I like scratching my own itches.
more inline:
On 06/29/2013 05:41 AM, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
I actually implemented part of this for my own personal toolkit. I presented it on the list to great fanfair here: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/A-new-XWiki-Model-sort-of-td7585722.html
I have the xar generation and push to XWiki in a 4 or 5 second post operation. The format is more makefile-esque so it's not really good for live sync but I have been using it and have not yet thrown it across the room which is a good indication that it's probably technologically sound.
Yes this is similar. However your implementation is in Javascript and we need an implementation based on the same code as xar:format as we would also need to read from the wiki to the file system and make sure that the xml files are properly formatted. We need xar:format compatible with this.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and
Textarea
fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
If we decide this is a priority, it's something which I could investigate and would be able to reuse experience and tools from the Resilience project.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is
his
development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
#1 can be many things. It could be as simple as my little .xar generator with ability to post to a live wiki. It could be as complex as an XWiki filesystem which you'd mount with nfs or something. If we commit to a directory structure, it is going to require a lot of thought to make that structure coherent and once we commit to it, we're kind of stuck with it.
I believe we would need to stick with what the maven xar plugin will like to be able to build, but at the same time looks nice enough in an IDE.
#3 is easy at first then it gets hard. We can pull in an editor and if we find an editor which supports ctags then we get completion for a reasonable price. The problem is ctags (and most editors) don't support velocity so if we want to autocomplete velocity we end up hacking something together and making a few demos then it's forgotten, or worse we write everything in-house to really support production ready velocity completion and then we're saddled with maintaining another 15k LoC that no other project has any interest in. http://ctags.sourceforge.net/languages.html
Well we don't have much choice here. Velocity is not that well supported. We also have XWiki Syntax which can have subparts using velocity, groovy or anything else. We will need to do some work here. We could simplify if we also extracted the content of some macros into external files, like the velocity and groovy macros. But still velocity is velocity + html + potentially XWiki syntax, so we need some custom handling here.
If what we want is extensions then we should go after extensions directly. The fastest growing extension repository is npm, while it's smaller than maven or rubygems, it's getting new packages at almost twice the rate of maven, the next competitor. My recommendation is to move in the #1 direction but specifically targeting XWiki extensions by copying the npm workflow.
We have a package manager. Now we need to make it easier to create the package from code you have in XWiki. But this is not fully related to the development tool which is something else. Right now you can create a XAR from xwiki in just a few clicks and commit it to GitHub (including the pom creation), using the GitHubApp. But this does not solve the IDE issue which is something else. However it's true that if your get your code in the file system we need to give a quick and easy way to create the pom. My purpose right now is not about the extension creation workflow. It's more about getting traditional developers to like the XWiki dev environment. I had multiple discussions with developers and while developers like a lot everything XWiki provides to speed up development from a framework perspective, they get cooled off by the developping in the browser concept. This is less true when the objective is an Intranet app on an existing instance. This is more true of web-agency style development or larger development projects. I firmly believe the future is in a WebIDE, but it will take time to takeover all developers. I like the #1 approach because it's not that complicated. It's the GitHubApp the way around with your file system with the "live" aspect. I've started some java code and found some nice library to watch changes in a directory. I'm already close to have an initial comparison of a maven xar project with a remote instance. The bigger work is to define how we split the code files (attachments, content fields, textarea fields and get maven xar plugin to support this). And once we have code like that you can use any IDE which is quite cool. Ludovic
Thanks, Caleb
Ludovic
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
I've started some prototype code for 1/ at https://github.com/ldubost/xwiki-projectsync/blob/master/src/main/java/org/x... Currently if you point it to a maven xar module with the command line -format /path/to/root/dir/of/project/ it will create some files for each content, textarea or attachments inside an XML file - Some code is also done to compare a wiki instance with that repository (no command line yet to launch it) - Some code allows to monitor changes in a directory (but nothing yet happens) It allows to see what it could mean to have the xml files spread in multiple code files. One big step is to decide if this is something we want because it is a prerequesit for such a tool. Ludovic 2013/6/29 Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]>
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
Ludovic
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
Here is the result of the filemanager application project opened in Eclipse after running the tool to extract the files: http://uploadpie.com/tFaIF Ludovic 2013/7/1 Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]>
I've started some prototype code for 1/ at
https://github.com/ldubost/xwiki-projectsync/blob/master/src/main/java/org/x...
Currently if you point it to a maven xar module with the command line
-format /path/to/root/dir/of/project/
it will create some files for each content, textarea or attachments inside an XML file
- Some code is also done to compare a wiki instance with that repository (no command line yet to launch it) - Some code allows to monitor changes in a directory (but nothing yet happens)
It allows to see what it could mean to have the xml files spread in multiple code files. One big step is to decide if this is something we want because it is a prerequesit for such a tool.
Ludovic
2013/6/29 Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]>
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
Ludovic
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
Hello Ludovic, First let me warmly thank you for such a thread we badly need such a thing that would unify the practice of source files that can be edited by desktop apps with some luxury (IDEs, design tools, ...) to the set of objects in the wiki. I am not 100% sure that the full-expansion tool is really fundamental as it creates quite many objects and many text areas or attachment could be considered trivial. (e.g. contents such as a line that does just an include could just be a line in the XML file) I would envision something a flexible xar plugin with two extensions: - parsing that would include xinclude, supporting attachments includes as well, the xml remains the main page container but can be enriched, when the developer says, by external files. The xar pugin would only load xml files and files referenced in there. These could be a velocity source for a text-area, doing html, js, or css, or could be a graphics in attachment. - a sync tool that would download and upload all necessary parts and write them, just as much as the XML says (that may be tricky to handle with new things, but I guess the default should just be xml and extraction would be manual, or through wiki) Shouldn't the code of the xar plugin be extended for such? Paul On 1 juil. 2013, at 00:59, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
I've started some prototype code for 1/ at
https://github.com/ldubost/xwiki-projectsync/blob/master/src/main/java/org/x...
Currently if you point it to a maven xar module with the command line
-format /path/to/root/dir/of/project/
it will create some files for each content, textarea or attachments inside an XML file
- Some code is also done to compare a wiki instance with that repository (no command line yet to launch it) - Some code allows to monitor changes in a directory (but nothing yet happens)
It allows to see what it could mean to have the xml files spread in multiple code files. One big step is to decide if this is something we want because it is a prerequesit for such a tool.
Ludovic
2013/6/29 Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]>
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides tons of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.
Finally a completion module could be provided by loading from the server a list of available APIs.
The same plugin could also be able to organize the content from a local maven project (based on 1/) and provide completion to such a project.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
3/ Integration of a WebIDE in XWiki
Based on Javascript WebIDE and web code editor softwares (Orion, Cloud9, exoIDE, codemirror, etc..), we would provide a view on the code inside the XWiki instance. Code would be organized in the same way as in the Eclipse plugin and appropriate editors would be used depending on the code type. Completion could be provided in the velocity and groovy editors and eventually in Javascript
Two views should be available, one for each AWM application, and one with all the code in the Wiki.
Live syntax checking could be provided.
Solution 1/ is very powerful because it let's the user decide which is his development environment, even if the tree structure won't be perfect. Still he can see all the code in the wiki and work on it, including searching. Committing is made very easy. There are some risks involved in the sync process, particularly of you have multiple developers syncing local code with the same dev server. User can switch from local sync (local wiki) to remove sync (remove shared wiki) and can therefore work offline more easily. Editing can be fully done offline.
Providing syntax highlighting for many editors might prove difficult.
Solution 2/ is providing a nice XWiki environment inside Eclipse, without the need for a local copy of the code. Committing would happen using the browser.
Solution 3/ is the long term bet as the future is to have everything in the web. Content is only in one place which makes things a little easier. Development environment needs no setup. However this is more "new" for developers which need to adopt the platform.
Live syntax checking is hard to provide but would be quite useful. Alternatively mvn xar:format could also provide syntax checking for XWiki syntax, velocity, groovy, js and css.
WDYT ? Which approaches do you believe would be the most promising.
Ludovic
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
Le mercredi 3 juillet 2013, Paul Libbrecht a écrit :
Hello Ludovic,
First let me warmly thank you for such a thread we badly need such a thing that would unify the practice of source files that can be edited by desktop apps with some luxury (IDEs, design tools, ...) to the set of objects in the wiki.
I am not 100% sure that the full-expansion tool is really fundamental as it creates quite many objects and many text areas or attachment could be considered trivial. (e.g. contents such as a line that does just an include could just be a line in the XML file)
I would envision something a flexible xar plugin with two extensions:
- parsing that would include xinclude, supporting attachments includes as well, the xml remains the main page container but can be enriched, when the developer says, by external files. The xar pugin would only load xml files and files referenced in there. These could be a velocity source for a text-area, doing html, js, or css, or could be a graphics in attachment.
I understand your approach. Now was is complex here is that it's the developer that decides to extract a fuels as a separate file. It's great one one side as we get good extension choice and naming. What is complicated is that you need a tool and UI to do this in the XWIKi commit apps, in the IDE or on the command line otherwise devs won't do it and even with the tools it might not happen. You get incoherence and we need coherence here if we want developers especially newbies to understand XWiki We need to quickly decide what the target file system view should be, on top of which we can have a "virtual view" for xeclipse
- a sync tool that would download and upload all necessary parts and write them, just as much as the XML says (that may be tricky to handle with new things, but I guess the default should just be xml and extraction would be manual, or through wiki)
Shouldn't the code of the xar plugin be extended for such?
Paul
On 1 juil. 2013, at 00:59, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
I've started some prototype code for 1/ at
https://github.com/ldubost/xwiki-projectsync/blob/master/src/main/java/org/x...
Currently if you point it to a maven xar module with the command line
-format /path/to/root/dir/of/project/
it will create some files for each content, textarea or attachments
inside
an XML file
- Some code is also done to compare a wiki instance with that repository (no command line yet to launch it) - Some code allows to monitor changes in a directory (but nothing yet happens)
It allows to see what it could mean to have the xml files spread in multiple code files. One big step is to decide if this is something we want because it is a prerequesit for such a tool.
Ludovic
2013/6/29 Ludovic Dubost <[email protected]>
While XWiki has many great advantages as a framework which takes car of persistence, forms, user management, content management and provides
tons
of APIs, when traditional developers want to extend XWiki there are facing a few difficulties:
- they are lost in the myriad of XWiki APIs, and there is no completion - they don't get good visibility of the code available in their application - it is complicated to use editors which have syntax highlighting - they cannot use their favorite IDE
On the framework side there are also some improvements which could make XWiki even more killer:
- easier integration of advanced JS framework - advanced integration of a high level JS framework that has templating (maybe angular js) - better validation functions - easier way to add REST APIs - more XWiki and better documented javascript apis
Here are some proposals to help fix the tools issues. Three approaches can be looked at:
1/ Live Sync between an XWiki Instance and and improved maven xar file structure, allowing to use any local IDE on XWiki code
First it should be possible to use any IDE on the maven xar file structure, allowing to open the content and textarea fields of all XML files. For this XWiki XML files should externalize the content and textarea fields in separate files with extensions based on their content type. The maven xar format should be able to clean the maven structure to do this splitting and should also be able to build the XAR from all the files.
Finally a program should allow to do a live sync between a local or remote wiki instance and the maven project. Any change in either the wiki or the file system should be replicated to the other party. So if you run "git pull" then your local or remote wiki would be updated. If a change is made in the wiki, the change would show up in the file system and your IDE would refresh it.
The sync program would keep a state of the version in the wiki, in order to be able to merge changes if changes occur in both places between two sync. This tool could be easily launched with "mvn xar:sync"
Syntax highlighting for XWiki Syntax+Velocity+Groovy would be developped for the most popular editors. When syncing the tool could show syntax checking error messages.
2/ Integration with Eclipse
Based on XEclipse, we would build an Eclipse plugin to be able to connect to an XWiki instance and load a specified list of spaces. Then each space would be organized by the type of code in this space. Content and Textarea fields would be made visible as editable content in Eclipse. The plugin should detect the type of code in each of the content or textarea fields (velocity/html, groovy, javascript, css, translations, xwiki syntax) and use the appropriate editor.<>
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On 4 juil. 2013, at 08:14, Ludovic Dubost wrote:
- parsing that would include xinclude, supporting attachments includes as well, the xml remains the main page container but can be enriched, when the developer says, by external files. The xar pugin would only load xml files and files referenced in there. These could be a velocity source for a text-area, doing html, js, or css, or could be a graphics in attachment.
I understand your approach. Now was is complex here is that it's the developer that decides to extract a fuels as a separate file. It's great one one side as we get good extension choice and naming. What is complicated is that you need a tool and UI to do this in the XWIKi commit apps, in the IDE or on the command line otherwise devs won't do it and even with the tools it might not happen. You get incoherence and we need coherence here if we want developers especially newbies to understand XWiki
Normal developers keep doing nose estimates to perform design decisions and that one would be just one of them. XWiki should not be concerned with that, only the xar plugin and possibly the xar export, following instructions of the developers. I note that it is very common that the file-name is not well defined. In my curriki sources, where the wiki project has a directory src/main/pages/ where page sources' text are saved, I have rather inconsistent file names. At least .grv, .vm, and .properties. And each has its utility. And I'd need a lot more. Automating the naming of such a thing means that you add types to textareas fields, I do not think we're ready for it, are we? The developers would edit the xml to "include" an external file and of course create the related file. The xar plugin would perform the necessary include and leave a processing instruction so that the export can do the converse. I am happy to try to code this. Is that the place to edit for such a modification? https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-commons/tree/master/xwiki-commons-tools/xwiki...
We need to quickly decide what the target file system view should be, on top of which we can have a "virtual view" for xeclipse
That seems more like a UI decision. I believe the screenshot you provided showed well how suddenly big it can become if it is fully automated. That's ok when you look at UIs but that is not the tight economy of "overseeable files" that developers like to have. For example, I think an important criterion is readibility of sources and their searchability but ensuring such criteria is the developers' job, not a universal thing. If, in a project, for example, a large amount of source files is spread in xwiki pages, these sources, and almost only them, would be extacted. If a large amount of jpegs, these would be extracted (hence their metadata be searchable by, say, spotlight). paul
Hello all, this thread has been quiet. Is the answer to the question below simply yes? Am I going to stumble in Guillaume's projected work? thanks in advance. Paul On 4 juil. 2013, at 09:07, Paul Libbrecht wrote:
The developers would edit the xml to "include" an external file and of course create the related file. The xar plugin would perform the necessary include and leave a processing instruction so that the export can do the converse.
I am happy to try to code this. Is that the place to edit for such a modification? https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-commons/tree/master/xwiki-commons-tools/xwiki...
On 4 juil. 2013, at 09:07, Paul Libbrecht wrote:
The developers would edit the xml to "include" an external file and of course create the related file. The xar plugin would perform the necessary include and leave a processing instruction so that the export can do the converse.
I am happy to try to code this. Is that the place to edit for such a modification? https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-commons/tree/master/xwiki-commons-tools/xwiki...
So I've looked around a bit because just now would be a good time and I had an issue related to the Package class. I understand XWiki is using dom4j as internal xml representation. I understand every time the xml is read, it is using SAXReader. My first step would be to support xinclude parse=text in xml documents. That would allow me to package the source files (especially of the page content) in the xar zips together with the xml sources and thus have a source tree made of short handwritten xml sources, and content sources. Later on, this could be generalized to attachments, the maven xar plugin would need to convert the binaries to base64 which would also be included using xinclude. Now, I am left with finding the right place where the xar import of XWiki ingests the XML and add the XInclude feature to it (which Xerces supports) (other places do not need the xinclude). I have found com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.packaging.Package in the method fromXml and readFromXML. Are there the only places? These method sound called from readFromDir and Import which I would reformulate to allow relative resolution (URLs need to be provided to the XML parser then). This will create a dom that has "forgotten" the XInclude (except maybe an invisible trace) and thus would not bother further xml (de)-serialization. Alternatively, I'd post process the dom4j tree to perform the xinclude (might be easier). thank you for your guidance through the sea of xwiki code. Paul
On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 10:50 PM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
On 4 juil. 2013, at 09:07, Paul Libbrecht wrote:
The developers would edit the xml to "include" an external file and of course create the related file. The xar plugin would perform the necessary include and leave a processing instruction so that the export can do the converse.
I am happy to try to code this. Is that the place to edit for such a modification? https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-commons/tree/master/xwiki-commons-tools/xwiki...
So I've looked around a bit because just now would be a good time and I had an issue related to the Package class.
I understand XWiki is using dom4j as internal xml representation. I understand every time the xml is read, it is using SAXReader.
My first step would be to support xinclude parse=text in xml documents. That would allow me to package the source files (especially of the page content) in the xar zips together with the xml sources and thus have a source tree made of short handwritten xml sources, and content sources.
Later on, this could be generalized to attachments, the maven xar plugin would need to convert the binaries to base64 which would also be included using xinclude.
Now, I am left with finding the right place where the xar import of XWiki ingests the XML and add the XInclude feature to it (which Xerces supports) (other places do not need the xinclude).
I have found com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.packaging.Package in the method fromXml and readFromXML. Are there the only places?
These method sound called from readFromDir and Import which I would reformulate to allow relative resolution (URLs need to be provided to the XML parser then). This will create a dom that has "forgotten" the XInclude (except maybe an invisible trace) and thus would not bother further xml (de)-serialization. Alternatively, I'd post process the dom4j tree to perform the xinclude (might be easier).
thank you for your guidance through the sea of xwiki code.
About that, I'm currently (or more precisely when I'm back from holidays in about 2 weeks or I will have problems :)) in the process of rewriting completely XAR import/export as wiki stream modules before including it as standard module hopefully in the 5.2 timeframe. The main difference from low level XML point of view is that it's now all based on StAX and there is not a line of dom4j or any other external XML library in XAR modules (except a bit of https://java.net/projects/stax-utils). The current state is a pretty much done core and most of the API and a started XAR output module (document/attachment part is pretty much done, still need to work on generic events for xclass/xobjects). See https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream. It would probably be better to forget about Package class and look directly at wiki stream.
Paul
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-- Thomas Mortagne
XInclude support may be a bit weak there but I found a processor that would map stream to stream (https://github.com/etourdot/xincproc). In any case, for attachments, one would also wish base64 encoding (so that files are... erm... files!) which is not in XInclude so would need a (non-standardized) extension.
The current state is a pretty much done core and most of the API and a started XAR output module (document/attachment part is pretty much done, still need to work on generic events for xclass/xobjects). See https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream.
Will this include an uploader for a single xml file (and its inclusions) into a remote wiki? That would be the really useful thing that is often breaking for me (I have a command-line uploader but it seems to create fuss recently).
It would probably be better to forget about Package class and look directly at wiki stream.
Can you give a little "handbook" for the case of: - producing a xar from a set of xml sources - uploading a set of xml files ? Thanks in advance. Paul
Hi Paul, as Ludovic said, at the seminar we had some brainstorming about this. To make things advance I wrote a first attempt at something that should be usable: XWikiFS - https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs It basically parses a directory structure and builds a XAR from it. I used "enhanced" YAML files for laying out stuff. This enhancement consists in the use of "references" that allows you to externalize content. For example in the YAML describing the page content https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... you have a "-> content.xwiki" saying that the actual content is in the content.xwiki file. This allows to keep and organize things better (e.g. for textarea object fields) There's this classinfo directory that contains the class file descriptions for the classes used in the objects. It's there because this information is needed in the XAR. If someone knows how to build a XAR with objects without including (redundant) class information it would be great (and we could get rid of this directory as well). The idea is that we can "monitor" the XWikiFS for changes and automatically upload them to the main wiki (handling the merging) and viceversa. It's a first iteration, so if you have any comments don't hesitate. Thanks, Fabio On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
XInclude support may be a bit weak there but I found a processor that would map stream to stream (https://github.com/etourdot/xincproc). In any case, for attachments, one would also wish base64 encoding (so that files are... erm... files!) which is not in XInclude so would need a (non-standardized) extension.
The current state is a pretty much done core and most of the API and a started XAR output module (document/attachment part is pretty much done, still need to work on generic events for xclass/xobjects). See https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream.
Will this include an uploader for a single xml file (and its inclusions) into a remote wiki? That would be the really useful thing that is often breaking for me (I have a command-line uploader but it seems to create fuss recently).
It would probably be better to forget about Package class and look directly at wiki stream.
Can you give a little "handbook" for the case of: - producing a xar from a set of xml sources - uploading a set of xml files ?
Thanks in advance.
Paul _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
This may or may not be important, NTFS forbids the : symbol in a filename. https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/tree/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... Thanks, Caleb On 08/22/2013 06:09 PM, Fabio Mancinelli wrote:
Hi Paul,
as Ludovic said, at the seminar we had some brainstorming about this. To make things advance I wrote a first attempt at something that should be usable: XWikiFS - https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs
It basically parses a directory structure and builds a XAR from it. I used "enhanced" YAML files for laying out stuff. This enhancement consists in the use of "references" that allows you to externalize content.
For example in the YAML describing the page content https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... you have a "-> content.xwiki" saying that the actual content is in the content.xwiki file.
This allows to keep and organize things better (e.g. for textarea object fields)
There's this classinfo directory that contains the class file descriptions for the classes used in the objects. It's there because this information is needed in the XAR. If someone knows how to build a XAR with objects without including (redundant) class information it would be great (and we could get rid of this directory as well).
The idea is that we can "monitor" the XWikiFS for changes and automatically upload them to the main wiki (handling the merging) and viceversa.
It's a first iteration, so if you have any comments don't hesitate.
Thanks, Fabio
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
XInclude support may be a bit weak there but I found a processor that would map stream to stream (https://github.com/etourdot/xincproc). In any case, for attachments, one would also wish base64 encoding (so that files are... erm... files!) which is not in XInclude so would need a (non-standardized) extension.
The current state is a pretty much done core and most of the API and a started XAR output module (document/attachment part is pretty much done, still need to work on generic events for xclass/xobjects). See https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream.
Will this include an uploader for a single xml file (and its inclusions) into a remote wiki? That would be the really useful thing that is often breaking for me (I have a command-line uploader but it seems to create fuss recently).
It would probably be better to forget about Package class and look directly at wiki stream.
Can you give a little "handbook" for the case of: - producing a xar from a set of xml sources - uploading a set of xml files ?
Thanks in advance.
Paul _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
Hello Fabio, Thanks for your attempt. I see in there the following: Space.Name | +- document.xwd +- class.xwc (optional) +- objects (optional) | | | +- classinfo | | | | | +- Space.Name1.xwc | | +- ... | +- Space.Name-N.xwo | +- ... +- attachments (optional) | +- file +- .... and I have four issues: - the attachments do not have a free positioning: attachments are commonly referenced in web-editing fashions when editing with some web-editor (e.g. an IDE or DreamWeaver) and their referencing mechanisms often follows the directory paths. This has made the success of PHP and JSP. I see no reasons to not put it here. Sometimes you need more flexibility and then you accept to loose the verification abilities (e.g. you could import a part of that from Word or Firefox, and this dictates a different directory layout). - the space/page structure is not following a directory structure (one directory per space). While this could certainly be discussable in some cases, it still appears to me as the most useful positioning but is not there. Again, this allows links to be somewhat better checked (and auto-completed, and...). - I see .xwd and .xwo files in there. Avoiding to fix the filename extensions appears crucial to me. I want to use IntelliJ's .vm support by using the .vm extension for many pages but sometimes, these should be translations! - Finally, I lack a possibility to put in a separate file a textarea-field (e.g. a panel content) whereas this sounds to be common-practice in xwiki. ... and a taste issue: I am not very friend with serialization languages which claim to do almost the same as XML but are just not XML (YAML, YML, ...). The toolset for XML is sooooo widespread that loosing this means you just need a bunch of extensions for just about any editor and this makes things longer to adopt. But that is personal for sure. <rant> Let's agree before JSON is imposed on us everywhere! </rant> ;-) I agree that the full XInclude is probably too much, but I do not think we need to achieve it fully. Paul
as Ludovic said, at the seminar we had some brainstorming about this. To make things advance I wrote a first attempt at something that should be usable: XWikiFS - https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs
It basically parses a directory structure and builds a XAR from it. I used "enhanced" YAML files for laying out stuff. This enhancement consists in the use of "references" that allows you to externalize content.
For example in the YAML describing the page content https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... you have a "-> content.xwiki" saying that the actual content is in the content.xwiki file.
This allows to keep and organize things better (e.g. for textarea object fields)
There's this classinfo directory that contains the class file descriptions for the classes used in the objects. It's there because this information is needed in the XAR. If someone knows how to build a XAR with objects without including (redundant) class information it would be great (and we could get rid of this directory as well).
The idea is that we can "monitor" the XWikiFS for changes and automatically upload them to the main wiki (handling the merging) and viceversa.
It's a first iteration, so if you have any comments don't hesitate.
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello Fabio,
Thanks for your attempt. I see in there the following: Space.Name | +- document.xwd +- class.xwc (optional) +- objects (optional) | | | +- classinfo | | | | | +- Space.Name1.xwc | | +- ... | +- Space.Name-N.xwo | +- ... +- attachments (optional) | +- file +- ....
and I have four issues: - the attachments do not have a free positioning: attachments are commonly referenced in web-editing fashions when editing with some web-editor (e.g. an IDE or DreamWeaver) and their referencing mechanisms often follows the directory paths. This has made the success of PHP and JSP. I see no reasons to not put it here. Sometimes you need more flexibility and then you accept to loose the verification abilities (e.g. you could import a part of that from Word or Firefox, and this dictates a different directory layout).
Not sure to understand what you mean here. Do you want to have a directory structure inside the attachments directory or you want your attachments to be everywhere in your filesystem (so outside the XWikiFS structure?) Both are feasible, the second using an additional file containing all the references.
- the space/page structure is not following a directory structure (one directory per space). While this could certainly be discussable in some cases, it still appears to me as the most useful positioning but is not there. Again, this allows links to be somewhat better checked (and auto-completed, and...).
No strong opinion here. I just went this way to reduce the depth of the directory tree.
- I see .xwd and .xwo files in there. Avoiding to fix the filename extensions appears crucial to me. I want to use IntelliJ's .vm support by using the .vm extension for many pages but sometimes, these should be translations!
The problem here is that something must be fixed. What is surely needed is 1) A file containing page metadata 2) A file containing class metadata 3) Several files containing object metadata 4) Several files containing referenced class metadata None of them are really mandatory, but we need a way to precisely identify them if they exist. For 1 and 2 the extension is not really important as long as we use a well defined file name. For 3 extension is important because it's the way for "finding" what contains object metadata in a directory that might contain also other stuff (see next comment) Same for 4. Of course we might go the way of a completely free layout where you define the an "index" file in the root directory and specify where things are. This could complexify the code a bit and would also introduce another level of indirection that could also make things less understandable for somebody using this system for authoring wiki pages.
- Finally, I lack a possibility to put in a separate file a textarea-field (e.g. a panel content) whereas this sounds to be common-practice in xwiki.
It's already there. You can externalize whatever you want :) If in your YAML files you write "-> filename" then the value of the field will be read from filename. In this way you can externalize every textarea-field to whatever file you want. I did this in the comment object. The XWO map ( https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... ) has a reference saying that the comment field will be found in the XWiki.XWikiComments-0/comment.txt file. And in that file ( https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... ) you have the actual value. XWiki.XWikiComments-0/comment.txt is completely arbirtary. You can use whatever file name/file path you want giving you the power of deciding your own directory layout for externalized values. And this is possible in every XWD, XWC, XWO file which gives you great flexibility in organizing stuff on top of a light rigid structure. I think it's a good compromise.
... and a taste issue: I am not very friend with serialization languages which claim to do almost the same as XML but are just not XML (YAML, YML, ...). The toolset for XML is sooooo widespread that loosing this means you just need a bunch of extensions for just about any editor and this makes things longer to adopt. But that is personal for sure.
<rant> Let's agree before JSON is imposed on us everywhere! </rant> ;-)
I agree that the full XInclude is probably too much, but I do not think we need to achieve it fully.
I chose YAML because it's the less verbose, intuitive and simple to handle syntax for describing maps. You can see it in the example files: no extra {}, no extra "", no extra commas, etc. It was the simplest thing for writing plain key-value files without typing extra characters. You might say that I could have used plain properties file or a simple "key: value" format using String.split for getting the actual key,value. True, but there is a case where this is not enough. Class files has the property value that is a nested map :) We don't need to go deeper but even this could have complicated the code a bit so I went to the YAML route.
Paul
Thanks, Fabio
as Ludovic said, at the seminar we had some brainstorming about this. To make things advance I wrote a first attempt at something that should be usable: XWikiFS - https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs
It basically parses a directory structure and builds a XAR from it. I used "enhanced" YAML files for laying out stuff. This enhancement consists in the use of "references" that allows you to externalize content.
For example in the YAML describing the page content https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... you have a "-> content.xwiki" saying that the actual content is in the content.xwiki file.
This allows to keep and organize things better (e.g. for textarea object fields)
There's this classinfo directory that contains the class file descriptions for the classes used in the objects. It's there because this information is needed in the XAR. If someone knows how to build a XAR with objects without including (redundant) class information it would be great (and we could get rid of this directory as well).
The idea is that we can "monitor" the XWikiFS for changes and automatically upload them to the main wiki (handling the merging) and viceversa.
It's a first iteration, so if you have any comments don't hesitate.
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Hi Fabio, I found the use of YAML a clever idea, even if I am concerned by the easy acceptance of that format, and I am not fully sure YAML will stay in use since the last specs is more than 5 years old. However, since YAML is a superset of JSON, have you tried specifying in pure JSON with your implementation, to see how less convenient it is ? This is also a pity that the standard does not support any external file reference syntax, which has cause you to invent one. We are not the first to face that issue (see for example this issue from the stacey site generator: https://github.com/kolber/stacey/issues/44). We should be really careful with such extension since this is like saying its YAML but not really. Anyway, this is a very interesting PoC, and we should definitely think about it further. Thanks, On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 12:09 AM, Fabio Mancinelli < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi Paul,
as Ludovic said, at the seminar we had some brainstorming about this. To make things advance I wrote a first attempt at something that should be usable: XWikiFS - https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs
It basically parses a directory structure and builds a XAR from it. I used "enhanced" YAML files for laying out stuff. This enhancement consists in the use of "references" that allows you to externalize content.
For example in the YAML describing the page content
https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... you have a "-> content.xwiki" saying that the actual content is in the content.xwiki file.
This allows to keep and organize things better (e.g. for textarea object fields)
There's this classinfo directory that contains the class file descriptions for the classes used in the objects. It's there because this information is needed in the XAR. If someone knows how to build a XAR with objects without including (redundant) class information it would be great (and we could get rid of this directory as well).
The idea is that we can "monitor" the XWikiFS for changes and automatically upload them to the main wiki (handling the merging) and viceversa.
It's a first iteration, so if you have any comments don't hesitate.
Thanks, Fabio
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
XInclude support may be a bit weak there but I found a processor that would map stream to stream (https://github.com/etourdot/xincproc). In any case, for attachments, one would also wish base64 encoding (so that files are... erm... files!) which is not in XInclude so would need a (non-standardized) extension.
The current state is a pretty much done core and most of the API and a started XAR output module (document/attachment part is pretty much done, still need to work on generic events for xclass/xobjects). See https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream.
Will this include an uploader for a single xml file (and its inclusions) into a remote wiki? That would be the really useful thing that is often breaking for me (I have a command-line uploader but it seems to create fuss recently).
It would probably be better to forget about Package class and look directly at wiki stream.
Can you give a little "handbook" for the case of: - producing a xar from a set of xml sources - uploading a set of xml files ?
Thanks in advance.
Paul _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
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-- Denis Gervalle SOFTEC sa - CEO eGuilde sarl - CTO
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Denis Gervalle <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Fabio,
I found the use of YAML a clever idea, even if I am concerned by the easy acceptance of that format, and I am not fully sure YAML will stay in use since the last specs is more than 5 years old. However, since YAML is a superset of JSON, have you tried specifying in pure JSON with your implementation, to see how less convenient it is ?
I haven't tried but it would be more verbose because you have to put {} around maps, "" around strings and commas at the end of everything. The problem that YAML is not staying and that its spec is old is imho a non-issue. I am using YAML just because it had a parser for parsing key:value files with nesting (see my previous email) I could have written 100 lines of code for doing that but I was too lazy :) So even if YAML would disappear tomorrow, the code that we have is more than sufficient for doing all we have to do.
This is also a pity that the standard does not support any external file reference syntax, which has cause you to invent one. We are not the first to face that issue (see for example this issue from the stacey site generator: https://github.com/kolber/stacey/issues/44). We should be really careful with such extension since this is like saying its YAML but not really.
As I said before, my goal was not using YAML because of YAML features. My goal was to have a very simple minimallistic textual file format for describing key:value associations with the possibility of having nesting. YAML happened to have a parser for that, so I used it :) Otherwise I would have written mine (which is still a possibility to reduce the dependency payload :))
Anyway, this is a very interesting PoC, and we should definitely think about it further.
Thanks, Fabio
Thanks,
On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 12:09 AM, Fabio Mancinelli < [email protected]> wrote:
Hi Paul,
as Ludovic said, at the seminar we had some brainstorming about this. To make things advance I wrote a first attempt at something that should be usable: XWikiFS - https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs
It basically parses a directory structure and builds a XAR from it. I used "enhanced" YAML files for laying out stuff. This enhancement consists in the use of "references" that allows you to externalize content.
For example in the YAML describing the page content
https://github.com/fmancinelli/xwikifs/blob/master/src/test/resources/Main.W... you have a "-> content.xwiki" saying that the actual content is in the content.xwiki file.
This allows to keep and organize things better (e.g. for textarea object fields)
There's this classinfo directory that contains the class file descriptions for the classes used in the objects. It's there because this information is needed in the XAR. If someone knows how to build a XAR with objects without including (redundant) class information it would be great (and we could get rid of this directory as well).
The idea is that we can "monitor" the XWikiFS for changes and automatically upload them to the main wiki (handling the merging) and viceversa.
It's a first iteration, so if you have any comments don't hesitate.
Thanks, Fabio
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
XInclude support may be a bit weak there but I found a processor that would map stream to stream (https://github.com/etourdot/xincproc). In any case, for attachments, one would also wish base64 encoding (so that files are... erm... files!) which is not in XInclude so would need a (non-standardized) extension.
The current state is a pretty much done core and most of the API and a started XAR output module (document/attachment part is pretty much done, still need to work on generic events for xclass/xobjects). See https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream.
Will this include an uploader for a single xml file (and its inclusions) into a remote wiki? That would be the really useful thing that is often breaking for me (I have a command-line uploader but it seems to create fuss recently).
It would probably be better to forget about Package class and look directly at wiki stream.
Can you give a little "handbook" for the case of: - producing a xar from a set of xml sources - uploading a set of xml files ?
Thanks in advance.
Paul _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Denis Gervalle SOFTEC sa - CEO eGuilde sarl - CTO _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]> wrote:
XInclude support may be a bit weak there but I found a processor that would map stream to stream (https://github.com/etourdot/xincproc). In any case, for attachments, one would also wish base64 encoding (so that files are... erm... files!) which is not in XInclude so would need a (non-standardized) extension.
The current state is a pretty much done core and most of the API and a started XAR output module (document/attachment part is pretty much done, still need to work on generic events for xclass/xobjects). See https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream.
Will this include an uploader for a single xml file (and its inclusions) into a remote wiki? That would be the really useful thing that is often breaking for me (I have a command-line uploader but it seems to create fuss recently).
Note that there is a REST resource to upload a XAR introduced by Fabio some time ago. WikiStream is not going to be some big monolitic module put in XWiki, it's just a generic API of events to represent wiki elements, then you have various output/input modules and higher level modules that are going to choose and input, output, filters and configure all that before executing the "graph" exactly like the rendering. For you use case there is several possibilities: * WikiStream comes with a generic (reflection based) XML format (and associated parser/serializer) which support any kind of event so you can represent any element of a wiki using that * the XAR output module already support outputting a single document XML (instead of a XAR) and I plan to support the same thing in the XAR input module. You can look at the current tests in the WikiStream XAR module (WikiStream comes with a test framework very similar to the Rendering test framework minus the cts for now): https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/wiki-stream/tree/master/xwiki-platform-wiki...
It would probably be better to forget about Package class and look directly at wiki stream.
Can you give a little "handbook" for the case of: - producing a xar from a set of xml sources
You would implement a custom InputWikiStreamFactory/InputWikiStream that would take care of converting your set of xml sources into proper events and use the XAR serializer as output.
- uploading a set of xml files
Depends what you mean by upload. If you mean import those XML files as documents in database then there is several possibilities I guess: you can either introduce you own REST resource that takes your custom XML set and then use your custom parser with the coming XWiki database output module. Another possibility is to generate a XAR on you side using WikiStream (it does not need to run in XWiki) with your custom parser as input and the XAR module as output and send it to the wiki using the existing XAR import resource. We can also imagine a lots of other ways depending of any other format supported as input of a REST resource.
?
Thanks in advance.
Paul _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Thomas Mortagne
At the XWiki SAS Seminar we had a meeting discussing possible new directory structures for the maven build. The notes are pretty rough as I did not have time to pass again on them and put more details: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/DirectoryStructureforXWikiApplica... Ludovic 2013/8/8 Paul Libbrecht <[email protected]>
On 4 juil. 2013, at 09:07, Paul Libbrecht wrote:
The developers would edit the xml to "include" an external file and of course create the related file. The xar plugin would perform the necessary include and leave a processing instruction so that the export can do the converse.
I am happy to try to code this. Is that the place to edit for such a modification?
https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-commons/tree/master/xwiki-commons-tools/xwiki...
So I've looked around a bit because just now would be a good time and I had an issue related to the Package class.
I understand XWiki is using dom4j as internal xml representation. I understand every time the xml is read, it is using SAXReader.
My first step would be to support xinclude parse=text in xml documents. That would allow me to package the source files (especially of the page content) in the xar zips together with the xml sources and thus have a source tree made of short handwritten xml sources, and content sources.
Later on, this could be generalized to attachments, the maven xar plugin would need to convert the binaries to base64 which would also be included using xinclude.
Now, I am left with finding the right place where the xar import of XWiki ingests the XML and add the XInclude feature to it (which Xerces supports) (other places do not need the xinclude).
I have found com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.packaging.Package in the method fromXml and readFromXML. Are there the only places?
These method sound called from readFromDir and Import which I would reformulate to allow relative resolution (URLs need to be provided to the XML parser then). This will create a dom that has "forgotten" the XInclude (except maybe an invisible trace) and thus would not bother further xml (de)-serialization. Alternatively, I'd post process the dom4j tree to perform the xinclude (might be easier).
thank you for your guidance through the sea of xwiki code.
Paul
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-- Ludovic Dubost Founder and CEO Blog: http://blog.ludovic.org/ XWiki: http://www.xwiki.com Skype: ldubost GTalk: ldubost
participants (8)
-
Caleb James DeLisle -
Caleb James DeLisle -
Denis Gervalle -
Fabio Mancinelli -
Ludovic Dubost -
Paul Libbrecht -
Thomas Mortagne -
Vincent Massol