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