Ludovic,
No dish can please everyone. I would like to say something in balance.
I have used XWiki for over one year, I respect and appreciate the XWiki team very much! I
have built several XWiki sites and they all are used by many. (especially our EITC2006
site)
Every time we have a problem, we found support. That is why I could convince my team to
keep using XWiki. I really enjoy seeing the growth and improvements of XWiki.
Yes, we need more features, we need better performance, we need better look and feel, but
'we' will make it happen. I could not make contribution in codes, but I have been
telling lots of people about XWiki. A growing community will produce a strong Open Source
solution. From what I have seen, I know this is the right place to be.
Keep up the good work. Thanks a lot.
Best regards,
Wei-hsing Wang
NicheUSA, LLC
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Ludovic Dubost <ludovic(a)xwiki.com>
Paul,
I am myself dismayed about your attitude and your lack of respect of
Open Source developers.
You might be one of these people that like Open Source much more because
it's free and because you can dig into other's people knowledge and
creations at will than because you can participate and help enhance and
improve it.
I'm really sorry that you lack of implication (although you have been
following the users and developers list since you have got 7 of your
questions answered without having help answer to any of the other's
users questions) have made you not notive that despite what you think
XWiki has made a lot of progress.
You would have seen that there is an XWiki 0.9.1252 which has many
improved features like:
- TinyMCE based WYSIWYG editor compatible with the XWiki syntax done
by a Google Summer of Code student
- Backlinks support
- Improved API with write-API and many new functions helping write web
sites
- A charting Wizard done by a Google Summer of Code student
- Multi Wiki support like no other wiki
- An XPath based Query language done by a Google Summe of Code student
- A cluster mode contributed by
TripAdvisor.com
You would also have seen that a Google Summer of Code is in the works with:
- Support JCR for storage with a migration path from hibernate database
storage
- A AJAX form editor
- A new XWiki 1.0 skin implementing the Usability recommandations
worked on last year
- A P2P Replication protocol allowing to work Offline and run XWiki on
multiple servers
It's sad that you haven't seen that we are trying hard to build a long
lasting Open Source Wiki able to tackle tomorrow's Wiki challenges. And
this not only takes code, documentation, but also the ability to invest
steadily in XWiki. I've personnally spent 2 years without any salary
working on XWiki as I created my own company. Thanks to users and
companies that better understand Open Source and our approach than you
do, we now have been able to hire close to 10 people to work on XWiki
and on projects based on XWiki. Close to 40 companies have trusted our
services to ask us to help them build solutions on top of XWiki.
Hundreds of companies are using XWiki for free. XWiki has been selected
for France State funded research project on Collaboration on P2P and
Mobility environements.
Also it's funny that I've received the same day as your email
congratulations and credits from the Sibelius-Academy in Finland which
has been using XWiki for the Music History Web Site
(
http://muhi.siba.fi/ -> it's in Finnish). Apparently they have been
able to tweak the XWiki look and feel better than you did.
I'm mainly sorry for you that you don't realize that Open Source
development means tons of hours of hard work shared with a community
which of course is free to use it or to use something else. But I tend
to believe that the minimum that users of Open Source software should
have is respect for developers sharing their work with a community. I
just hope that you will learn this while joining the TWiki community
which I have a lot of respect for as I've been using and contributing to
TWiki for 3 years before writing XWiki.
We'll take the positive out of your nasty email, which I'm sure is due
to frustration at not finding what you needed from XWiki (a free lunch
?). We'll try to learn from it to improve our documentation, developer
guides (anybody wanting to help ?), our code quality and architecture.
I realize that this email might sound a little aggressive towards you,
but sometimes it's good to set things straight.
Good luck for you in the future. I just hope you'll be a better user and
contributor of TWiki.
Ludovic
Paul Dlug a écrit :
We just completed a conversion from XWiki to
TWiki because of the
numerous limitations of XWiki (really awful to understand permissions
system, slow pace of development, lack of plugins, horrid look and
feel, etc.). We initially tried to convert the syntax to TWiki using
perl with Parse::RecDescent. Since the grammar is rather unstructured
and regex/exception based this isn't an easy thing to do. We were
successfully in hacking up a version of XWiki/Radeox that outputs the
XWIki syntax as TWiki syntax. Since this uses the native structures
inside the original java code the conversion is much cleaner.
If anyone else is migrating from XWiki to TWiki let me know if you'd
like the code to batch convert the whole wiki at once. I'm happy to
save others the pain of doing this themselves.
As an aside, I am dismayed at the slow progress of XWiki in the time
we have been using it (over a year and a half). I was also quite
appalled when I started digging into the code to this, it's messy,
undocumented, and rife with duplicate logic.
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Ludovic Dubost
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