Vincent Massol wrote:

You're the first one I see to have this need so I'm curious to  
understand what's your use case first. My belief is that you're not  
using XWiki properly.
  
Me again jumping in others' threads! :-(

Before XWiki arrives to our lives, their are much easier now, we use Oracle and MySQL RDBMS to store experimental data. Personal data are stored in a LDAP enabled directory service.

To be able to read/write to/from these repositories from XWiki has been always an objective, but always delayed as we need have more urgent issues to solve!

Harikrishnan's entry put the issue top in our to-do list!

Let's see if this make sense for you:
  1. We use XWiki to create a collaboration environment: the whole team can contribute to a new document. XWiki user's database is synchronized with our eDirectory directory service by using LDAP.
  2. New documents include "structured" text (heading1, heading2, body, list,...), pictures and code.
  3. Among "code" we include small "programs" generating graphs and tables from the relational data sharing MySQL with XWiki as RDBMS. We use R to generate graphs and tables: to be able to call R directly from XWiki will be a great plus, but it is not strictly required at the current stage of development.
  4. Documents will be eventually included as "code" as far as we would like to use LaTeX as typesetting tool.
With this work flow (I think it is a "correct" use for XWiki), the first thing to solve is what Harikrishnan is asking for... and ready to contribute with!!!

So, these are only my two cents. I do hope it makes sense and helps to clarify the problem, doesn't it?

Cheers,
-- 
Ricardo Rodríguez
Your XEN ICT Team