On Jun 21, 2007, at 10:06 AM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
Hi,
a bit of history would be interesting here :-)
Basically, when XWiki was first written its aim was to provide an eXtended - wiki (hence X - Wiki) that would include the best features out there at the time (back in 2003 I think). Ludovic was inspired by TWiki he used to great effect in his previous jobs, but felt like something was missing.
Then he wrote XWiki, with the aim of making it a modular and flexible platform. It is one of the few wikis to offer the easy application building capabilities it has, and the only Open Source wiki I know of to provide this. TWiki offers flexibility through plugins too, but not to the level XWiki does. You can create a template in minutes and tweak it to suit your need, immediately.
To keep it short, XWiki is meant by design to be easy to add to and to build from while TWiki does so less natively.
Then all the reasons you suggested are important too (XWiki is written in JAVA, it has a great user group, its future direction is decided clearly and access control rights are tough), depending on what your requirements are and what programmation languages you are literate in...
Hope this helps a bit, please ask for more details if you need them :-)
I'm pretty sure TWiki fans would say something similar ;) It would be interesting to know TWiki's fan answers if you've asked on their lists...
I have also used TWiki in the past (it was the first wiki I ever used). I think you're right in saying that it mostly depend on your familiarity with the underlying language. I have the feeling XWiki is closer to large Enterprise needs than TWiki is simply because the Java platform is the selection of choice for lots of large companies.