Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be,
and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to
it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as
well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same
appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was
limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I
think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share
the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to
all.
However, all three used separate user databases and
hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to
look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion,
because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each
of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't
understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an
equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which
is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically
registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of
course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little
standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the
user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's
specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished
in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API
parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two
weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my
jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of
a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and
had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with
Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the
vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the
ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly
because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its
deployment.
brain[sic]
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on
various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any
"better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody
installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio