6 Jun
2008
6 Jun
'08
9:15 a.m.
Hi Erwan,
On Jun 6, 2008, at 7:22 AM, Erwan Loisant wrote:
Hello,
First of all thank you for that great piece of software; I'm going to
deploy it in my company because I could demo a project management
application that I wrote in a couple hours (starting without much
knowledge of xwiki). That's going to make everyone life's easier.
Great! We love to hear these kinds of stories. Keep them coming!
So, I started to build a prototype based on this
tutorial (I believe
this is Velocity)
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/FAQTutorial
You can also check this more detailed tutorial:
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=XWiki
Now, I'm trying to get a good workflow to go
beyond the trivial app.
I'm hoping for source code management, be productive while coding, and
an easy way to deploy the app on a different wiki (i.e. build it on my
machine then deploy on production). Later, I may want to keep a dev
version in parallel of the prod version so I can play around without
making executives mad at me for breaking stuff... And deploy the
changes to the prod when it's ready.
So, here we go:
* SCM: I noticed that, being a wiki, there's basically a SCM included.
Even if versions are page based instead of project based, that's
probably enough.
Yep. If not you can still save your xwiki pages in your favorite SCM
(by doing exports/imports) but it involves more steps.
* Text editor: is there a way to use my preferred text
editor (that
happens to be VI) rather than my web browser? I remember seeing
Eclipse used in a demo in SF, is it possible with other editors as
well?
Yes we have a tool called XEClipse:
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extensions/XEclipseExtension
This should allow you to get the best productivity. You can even
install it inside Eclipse and use the vi keybinding if you want I
guess... ;)
You can use any text editor for writing wiki page content and then
later on copy/paste them in xwiki pages. The only issue you'll have is
with Objects/Classes since you won't be able to define them in your
editor. BTW we've just added support for Objects in XEclipse (not
released yet, needs to be built from trunk).
* Import/export: I could only find export of the whole
wiki. I guess
there's a way to export a selection of pages (or a whole space?) but I
couldn't find it. What about classes? Are classes just a special kind
of page that can be exported along with the rest?
Classes are in pages so they're also exported/imported. Re selective
we're missing this as part of the main feature (we should really add
it especially as it's not hard). We do have some way around, see
http://xwiki.markmail.org/search/?q=selective%20export
* I think I read somewhere that properties can't
be deleted from
classes. Is it still true? If yes, is there a way to get rid of a
property (for example by deleting the class then recreate it) without
loosing all instances?
Unfortunately this is not ready yet. Someone was working on it 1 or 2
months ago. You can follow
http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-99 to monitor the status.
In general, is it unrealistic to try to get that kind
of process with
an app that is just made of custom classes and a set of Velocity
scripts?
No. That's what we're trying to achieve in the near future. So far
we've worked mostly on the wiki platform/engine. I think the coming
months will see improvements in the development features of xwiki.
Thanks
-Vincent