On 09/21/2012 01:42 AM, ray ye wrote:
Hi All, Two WYSIWYG editors were included in XWiki -- tinyMCE and GWT-based.
I understand that 1. tinyMCE was used at the very beginning, and later GWT-based was used to replace tinyMEC because tinyMCE was buggy, and its performance was not good (at the time) 2. the version for tinyMCE included in XWiki 4.1.4 is 2.0.6.1 released on 2006-05-04 ( I checked the code ), and the latest version is 3.5.7 release on 2012-09-20.
My questions are: 1. have any one revisit later release of tinyMCE, since lots have changed over the 6 years?
Bugs and performance were not the only issues that led us to create a new WYSIWYG; they're not even the most important ones. TinyMCE is basically a HTML editor, while XWiki deals with wiki markup. When the TinyMCE-based editor was developed, support for wiki markup was added using a "theme" with several plugins. The gist of this theme was regular expressions: run several regexps to convert wiki markup to HTML and back. This was acceptable because the early XWiki versions had just one syntax (xwiki/1.0), which was fairly simple. Still, there were two different implementations for the wiki rendering engine, one in Java and one in JavaScript, and any code duplication is bad. The syntax was tightened over time, using regexp features present only in Java (positive and negative look arounds, greedy operators), so the WYSIWYG didn't implement exactly the same syntax... Another problem is that XWiki has support not just for basic wiki markup (bold, italic, links, headers...), but also for complex macros, and macros can't be implemented using just regular expressions. And now XWiki knows more than one wiki syntax, so maintaining several syntaxes in two very different places is definitely not something we'd want to do. We could consider upgrading to a more recent version of TinyMCE, but the problem is that we've customized the sources so much that such an upgrade would take a lot of time, and for something that's not going to be that useful. We decided a long time ago that having our own editor is the way to go.
2. for the GWT-based WYSIWYG solution, is it developed by XWiki? and is there a way that i can get WYSIWYG related codes only, and integrate it into one of our internal project?
Marius already answered this question, I'll just add that the WYSIWYG editor works best combined with the XWiki rendering engine, which can be integrated in any project, since it has no dependencies on the XWiki platform. See http://rendering.xwiki.org/ for more details.
Thank you very much!
-- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/