Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi, With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ? Thanks, Antonio
Antonio: This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance... Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all. However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this. If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course. The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment. brain[sic] ________________________________ From: Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki Hi, With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ? Thanks, Antonio
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications. Antonio 2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Which-forum-to-use-with-XWiki-tf3597125.html#a10851241 Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Jforum is very fast and lightweight from what I've noted since installing it (running Xwiki and Jforum on the same server atm). The real bonus is that you need no additional software on your server for the Jforum; other than the few configurations needed it's painless. All that's needed to make it even more user friendly is single-sign-on. -----Original Message----- From: shivshan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 29 May 2007 11:12 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as
well).
We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver
with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to
placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think)
one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look
mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle
space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of
a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly
because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Which-forum-to-use-with-XWiki-tf3597125.html#a1085 1241 Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
hey shiva, i finished exactly the scenario you depicted yesterday: the many advantages of xwiki (as blog and wiki engine) combined with an advanced forum, that takes into account the discoursive nature of knowledge development in enterprises as well as in non profit contexts. in brief, there are two major issues: authentication and authorisation. fortunately the xwiki developpers have done a good job in providing a configurable mechanism to switch the authentication class (see xwiki.cfg or the respective section in the admin guide) You implement the XWikiAuthService and probably the XWikiAuthenticator interfaces and at the next login, credentials are verified you defined in these classes. i do an (layered) access to an existing application (the forum part of your scenario; it's not necessarily the better user management, it simply was there first). a little trickier is the second issue, authorisation. i decided to let the quite mature user / group / right management systems of both apps as untouched as possible, but enable one of them to rule over the other. sergiu uttered the idea of a REST approach, which i turned into some kind of remote control for the xwiki user management. so, whenever my forum admin want to have a new group, a new group is created in both systems, a space with the id [groupname] is created where only grup member have edit rights etc. i attached an outline of that class. that is, however, not the only way to do what you want, and possibly not even the most appropriate. Yours Thomas shivshan schrieb:
Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva
Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- ontopica Thomas Krämer Krämer&Okpue GbR Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
I have also implemented SSO with XWiki, and also agreed that the rights management of XWiki was very robust. Further, I didn't want to take away (or re-implement) the XWiki rights administration tools, because while authentication (from an enterprise standpoint) is a matter for the corporate security authorities, authorization to wiki resources is a matter for the wiki admins. My solution, which has since been applied to many other J2EE applications in our enterprise, is to use a servlet filter to intercept the requests, check out the SSO-supplied cookies, and redirect to the SSO service if not found, without having to implement our own XWiki authentication service. Actually, two instances of the filter were created: one optioned to redirect if proper authentication cookies were not found, and one that simply passed through in that event. In this way, we could get and use the identity of those who were authenticated without requiring authentication to paths that didn't require it. Indeed, because XWiki redirects any unauthenticated request for an action requiring authentication to the login page, the authentication-required version only needed to be mapped to the /login/* url-pattern. It also handled the registration of any user who hadn't been seen before, and mapped attributes provided by the SSO cookies to XWiki groups, through an XWiki document which associated a cookie field and a regular expression with a group, so that if the specified cookie field matched the regular expression, the user was added to the group. In this way a proper separation of duties was maintained between the enterprise SSO system and the local administration which it informed. Equally important for me, I didn't need to modify any XWiki code, so that migrating the solution to 1.0 required only making the same modifications to the user profile document that had been made to the 0.9.840 instances and importing the group mapping page. brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Krämer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 6:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
hey shiva,
i finished exactly the scenario you depicted yesterday:
the many advantages of xwiki (as blog and wiki engine) combined with an advanced forum, that takes into account the discoursive nature of knowledge development in enterprises as well as in non profit contexts.
in brief, there are two major issues: authentication and authorisation.
fortunately the xwiki developpers have done a good job in providing a configurable mechanism to switch the authentication class (see xwiki.cfg or the respective section in the admin guide)
You implement the XWikiAuthService and probably the XWikiAuthenticator interfaces and at the next login, credentials are verified you defined in these classes. i do an (layered) access to an existing application (the forum part of your scenario; it's not necessarily the better user management, it simply was there first).
a little trickier is the second issue, authorisation.
i decided to let the quite mature user / group / right management systems of both apps as untouched as possible, but enable one of them to rule over the other.
sergiu uttered the idea of a REST approach, which i turned into some kind of remote control for the xwiki user management.
so, whenever my forum admin want to have a new group, a new group is created in both systems, a space with the id [groupname] is created where only grup member have edit rights etc.
i attached an outline of that class.
that is, however, not the only way to do what you want, and possibly not even the most appropriate.
Yours
Thomas
shivshan schrieb:
Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva
Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- ontopica
Thomas Krämer
Krämer&Okpue GbR
Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn
Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
Now that sounds like an interesting solution.. Any info on setting that up would be welcome ;). -----Original Message----- From: THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 29 May 2007 14:09 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki I have also implemented SSO with XWiki, and also agreed that the rights management of XWiki was very robust. Further, I didn't want to take away (or re-implement) the XWiki rights administration tools, because while authentication (from an enterprise standpoint) is a matter for the corporate security authorities, authorization to wiki resources is a matter for the wiki admins. My solution, which has since been applied to many other J2EE applications in our enterprise, is to use a servlet filter to intercept the requests, check out the SSO-supplied cookies, and redirect to the SSO service if not found, without having to implement our own XWiki authentication service. Actually, two instances of the filter were created: one optioned to redirect if proper authentication cookies were not found, and one that simply passed through in that event. In this way, we could get and use the identity of those who were authenticated without requiring authentication to paths that didn't require it. Indeed, because XWiki redirects any unauthenticated request for an action requiring authentication to the login page, the authentication-required version only needed to be mapped to the /login/* url-pattern. It also handled the registration of any user who hadn't been seen before, and mapped attributes provided by the SSO cookies to XWiki groups, through an XWiki document which associated a cookie field and a regular expression with a group, so that if the specified cookie field matched the regular expression, the user was added to the group. In this way a proper separation of duties was maintained between the enterprise SSO system and the local administration which it informed. Equally important for me, I didn't need to modify any XWiki code, so that migrating the solution to 1.0 required only making the same modifications to the user profile document that had been made to the 0.9.840 instances and importing the group mapping page. brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Krämer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 6:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
hey shiva,
i finished exactly the scenario you depicted yesterday:
the many advantages of xwiki (as blog and wiki engine) combined with an advanced forum, that takes into account the discoursive nature of knowledge development in enterprises as well as in non profit contexts.
in brief, there are two major issues: authentication and authorisation.
fortunately the xwiki developpers have done a good job in providing a configurable mechanism to switch the authentication class (see xwiki.cfg or the respective section in the admin guide)
You implement the XWikiAuthService and probably the XWikiAuthenticator interfaces and at the next login, credentials are verified you defined in these classes. i do an (layered) access to an existing application (the forum part of your scenario; it's not necessarily the better user management, it simply was there first).
a little trickier is the second issue, authorisation.
i decided to let the quite mature user / group / right management systems of both apps as untouched as possible, but enable one of them to rule over the other.
sergiu uttered the idea of a REST approach, which i turned into some kind of remote control for the xwiki user management.
so, whenever my forum admin want to have a new group, a new group is created in both systems, a space with the id [groupname] is created where only grup member have edit rights etc.
i attached an outline of that class.
that is, however, not the only way to do what you want, and possibly not even the most appropriate.
Yours
Thomas
shivshan schrieb:
Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva
Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- ontopica
Thomas Krämer
Krämer&Okpue GbR
Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn
Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
Having very little time, I'll have to give it to you in bits, I think, relying on your ability to find out and fill in details for yourself. First and foremost, you need to be familiar with the Servlet API if you're not already. Sun has a very good PDF document on the whole thing (java.sun.com/ something or other; sorry, don't have the link handy). The servlet filter is an implementation of javax.servlet.Filter. The doFilter method is passed the request, response, and the filter chain. From the request you can get the cookies, the servlet context, and the session, where you can squirrel away any data that need to persist throughout the session; the response is what you need in order to redirect; and the filter chain is what you use to pass an accepted request down the chain. All of the application-specific stuff is in a custom implementation of an interface, whose most important method returns an HttpServletRequestWrapper made from the original request. For XWiki, the wrapper must implement HttpServletRequestWrapper.getUserPrincipal() to return a java.lang.Principal implementation whose getName() method returns the XWiki username (which, unfortunately, is not the same as the user's login name but the name of the user's XWiki profile, "XWiki."+logname). This Principal object must also be stored in the HttpSession under the key named by org.securityfilter.filter.SecurityRequestWrapper.PRINCIPAL_SESSION_KEY in order to complete the deception that keeps XWiki from any clue that its own authentication scheme has not been successfully negotiated. I think there are better ways to do it, but I simply modified the XWiki.Login template to redirect to the URL given by the xredirect parameter if present, or the default page (Main.WebHome) if not. Since (ironically enough) the filter will never allow an unauthenticated request to reach that path, this will be appropriate. To do the user pre-registration and group membership parts, you have to get a handle on the XWiki instance and a workable context. I used com.xpn.xwiki.web.ViewEditAction as an example, and called the static method XWiki.getXWiki(context), which required a call to Utils.prepareContext with a newly-created XWikiContext and a bunch of stuff that you have to create. Group memberships are a pain, because the requirements for saving objects with a document were not (to me) intuitive at all; the only way I was able to figure it out was by looking at the sources for XWikiService.actionObjectRemove. You should be able to get started now; probably should mail questions etc. directly to me, and maybe we can summarize to the list or to xwiki.org. brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Esbach, Brandon [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 8:18 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Now that sounds like an interesting solution.. Any info on setting that up would be welcome ;).
-----Original Message----- From: THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 29 May 2007 14:09 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
I have also implemented SSO with XWiki, and also agreed that the rights management of XWiki was very robust. Further, I didn't want to take away (or re-implement) the XWiki rights administration tools, because while authentication (from an enterprise standpoint) is a matter for the corporate security authorities, authorization to wiki resources is a matter for the wiki admins.
My solution, which has since been applied to many other J2EE applications in our enterprise, is to use a servlet filter to intercept the requests, check out the SSO-supplied cookies, and redirect to the SSO service if not found, without having to implement our own XWiki authentication service. Actually, two instances of the filter were created: one optioned to redirect if proper authentication cookies were not found, and one that simply passed through in that event. In this way, we could get and use the identity of those who were authenticated without requiring authentication to paths that didn't require it. Indeed, because XWiki redirects any unauthenticated request for an action requiring authentication to the login page, the authentication-required version only needed to be mapped to the /login/* url-pattern.
It also handled the registration of any user who hadn't been seen before, and mapped attributes provided by the SSO cookies to XWiki groups, through an XWiki document which associated a cookie field and a regular expression with a group, so that if the specified cookie field matched the regular expression, the user was added to the group. In this way a proper separation of duties was maintained between the enterprise SSO system and the local administration which it informed. Equally important for me, I didn't need to modify any XWiki code, so that migrating the solution to 1.0 required only making the same modifications to the user profile document that had been made to the 0.9.840 instances and importing the group mapping page.
brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Krämer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 6:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
hey shiva,
i finished exactly the scenario you depicted yesterday:
the many advantages of xwiki (as blog and wiki engine) combined with an advanced forum, that takes into account the discoursive nature of knowledge development in enterprises as well as in non profit contexts.
in brief, there are two major issues: authentication and authorisation.
fortunately the xwiki developpers have done a good job in providing a configurable mechanism to switch the authentication class (see xwiki.cfg or the respective section in the admin guide)
You implement the XWikiAuthService and probably the XWikiAuthenticator interfaces and at the next login, credentials are verified you defined in these classes. i do an (layered) access to an existing application (the forum part of your scenario; it's not necessarily the better user management, it simply was there first).
a little trickier is the second issue, authorisation.
i decided to let the quite mature user / group / right management systems of both apps as untouched as possible, but enable one of them to rule over the other.
sergiu uttered the idea of a REST approach, which i turned into some kind of remote control for the xwiki user management.
so, whenever my forum admin want to have a new group, a new group is created in both systems, a space with the id [groupname] is created where only grup member have edit rights etc.
i attached an outline of that class.
that is, however, not the only way to do what you want, and possibly not even the most appropriate.
Yours
Thomas
shivshan schrieb:
Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva
Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- ontopica
Thomas Krämer
Krämer&Okpue GbR
Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn
Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
Hello that sounds like a very clean solution. A couple of days ago i tried to start a discussion about the points you mentionned: separtion of concerns / id management / wiki access management. currently, the "SSO" is achieved, by letting one of two applications (the forum) handle the credentials. Towards a less coupled and more flexible (a "real") SSO, i /we 'd need to choose from varios SSO solutions and adapt xwiki in a way as you did, for example. Did you use an os sso, Thomas? I thought of yale cas, but there are interesting idms like + http://esoeproject.org/ + http://www.josso.org/ + http://www.acegisecurity.org/ and of course + http://jguard.net/ Vincent remarked, that this could possibly fit into the XEM project, that recently started. I think it would be a good idea to agree on an SSO / idms and make a joint implementation effort, if there are more people, that have xwiki plus x. What's your opinion? Regards Thomas THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) schrieb:
I have also implemented SSO with XWiki, and also agreed that the rights management of XWiki was very robust. Further, I didn't want to take away (or re-implement) the XWiki rights administration tools, because while authentication (from an enterprise standpoint) is a matter for the corporate security authorities, authorization to wiki resources is a matter for the wiki admins.
My solution, which has since been applied to many other J2EE applications in our enterprise, is to use a servlet filter to intercept the requests, check out the SSO-supplied cookies, and redirect to the SSO service if not found, without having to implement our own XWiki authentication service. Actually, two instances of the filter were created: one optioned to redirect if proper authentication cookies were not found, and one that simply passed through in that event. In this way, we could get and use the identity of those who were authenticated without requiring authentication to paths that didn't require it. Indeed, because XWiki redirects any unauthenticated request for an action requiring authentication to the login page, the authentication-required version only needed to be mapped to the /login/* url-pattern.
It also handled the registration of any user who hadn't been seen before, and mapped attributes provided by the SSO cookies to XWiki groups, through an XWiki document which associated a cookie field and a regular expression with a group, so that if the specified cookie field matched the regular expression, the user was added to the group. In this way a proper separation of duties was maintained between the enterprise SSO system and the local administration which it informed. Equally important for me, I didn't need to modify any XWiki code, so that migrating the solution to 1.0 required only making the same modifications to the user profile document that had been made to the 0.9.840 instances and importing the group mapping page.
brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Krämer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 6:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
hey shiva,
i finished exactly the scenario you depicted yesterday:
the many advantages of xwiki (as blog and wiki engine) combined with an advanced forum, that takes into account the discoursive nature of knowledge development in enterprises as well as in non profit contexts.
in brief, there are two major issues: authentication and authorisation.
fortunately the xwiki developpers have done a good job in providing a configurable mechanism to switch the authentication class (see xwiki.cfg or the respective section in the admin guide)
You implement the XWikiAuthService and probably the XWikiAuthenticator interfaces and at the next login, credentials are verified you defined in these classes. i do an (layered) access to an existing application (the forum part of your scenario; it's not necessarily the better user management, it simply was there first).
a little trickier is the second issue, authorisation.
i decided to let the quite mature user / group / right management systems of both apps as untouched as possible, but enable one of them to rule over the other.
sergiu uttered the idea of a REST approach, which i turned into some kind of remote control for the xwiki user management.
so, whenever my forum admin want to have a new group, a new group is created in both systems, a space with the id [groupname] is created where only grup member have edit rights etc.
i attached an outline of that class.
that is, however, not the only way to do what you want, and possibly not even the most appropriate.
Yours
Thomas
shivshan schrieb:
Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva
Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws -- ontopica
Thomas Krämer
Krämer&Okpue GbR
Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn
Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- ontopica Thomas Krämer Krämer&Okpue GbR Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
Actually using IBM's Tivoli Access Manager (TAM), which sets the cookies. We do have a couple of web apps such as Roller that use acegi, which is implemented via filters, which provided some bigger challenges because we were trying to use our own filter. I think the best way to use acegi would probably be the way it was meant to be used, which is to configure the specific SSO details into it, but because I wasn't the one doing it, I didn't get to dig into its configuration. Atlassian's Confluence also has its own filter-based authentication system called Seraph, which I also used my filter to deceive, though the auto-registration hasn't been done yet, and Crowd, which I think is becoming an open-source app, may have something to do with SSO. See atlassian.com for details on those. Even beyond the filters, which are a container service, is the J2EE Container-managed Security, which TAM interacts with via a Trust Association Interceptor (TAI). For more information on that, see the Common Secure Interoperability specification, version 2 (CSIv2). I don't remember at all who maintains that spec; I first learned of it through the Object Management Group, but of course Google is your friend... brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Krämer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 8:31 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hello
that sounds like a very clean solution. A couple of days ago i tried to start a discussion about the points you mentionned: separtion of concerns / id management / wiki access management.
currently, the "SSO" is achieved, by letting one of two applications (the forum) handle the credentials.
Towards a less coupled and more flexible (a "real") SSO, i /we 'd need to choose from varios SSO solutions and adapt xwiki in a way as you did, for example.
Did you use an os sso, Thomas? I thought of yale cas, but there are interesting idms like + http://esoeproject.org/ + http://www.josso.org/ + http://www.acegisecurity.org/ and of course http://jguard.net/
Vincent remarked, that this could possibly fit into the XEM project, that recently started.
I think it would be a good idea to agree on an SSO / idms and make a joint implementation effort, if there are more people, that have xwiki plus x.
What's your opinion?
Regards
Thomas
THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) schrieb:
I have also implemented SSO with XWiki, and also agreed that the rights management of XWiki was very robust. Further, I didn't want to take away (or re-implement) the XWiki rights administration tools, because while authentication (from an enterprise standpoint) is a matter for the corporate security authorities, authorization to wiki resources is a matter for the wiki admins.
My solution, which has since been applied to many other J2EE applications in our enterprise, is to use a servlet filter to intercept the requests, check out the SSO-supplied cookies, and redirect to the SSO service if not found, without having to implement our own XWiki authentication service. Actually, two instances of the filter were created: one optioned to redirect if proper authentication cookies were not found, and one that simply passed through in that event. In this way, we could get and use the identity of those who were authenticated without requiring authentication to paths that didn't require it. Indeed, because XWiki redirects any unauthenticated request for an action requiring authentication to the login page, the authentication-required version only needed to be mapped to the /login/* url-pattern.
It also handled the registration of any user who hadn't been seen before, and mapped attributes provided by the SSO cookies to XWiki groups, through an XWiki document which associated a cookie field and a regular expression with a group, so that if the specified cookie field matched the regular expression, the user was added to the group. In this way a proper separation of duties was maintained between the enterprise SSO system and the local administration which it informed. Equally important for me, I didn't need to modify any XWiki code, so that migrating the solution to 1.0 required only making the same modifications to the user profile document that had been made to the 0.9.840 instances and importing the group mapping page.
brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Krämer [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 6:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
hey shiva,
i finished exactly the scenario you depicted yesterday:
the many advantages of xwiki (as blog and wiki engine) combined with an advanced forum, that takes into account the discoursive nature of knowledge development in enterprises as well as in non profit contexts.
in brief, there are two major issues: authentication and authorisation.
fortunately the xwiki developpers have done a good job in providing a configurable mechanism to switch the authentication class (see xwiki.cfg or the respective section in the admin guide)
You implement the XWikiAuthService and probably the XWikiAuthenticator interfaces and at the next login, credentials are verified you defined in these classes. i do an (layered) access to an existing application (the forum part of your scenario; it's not necessarily the better user management, it simply was there first).
a little trickier is the second issue, authorisation.
i decided to let the quite mature user / group / right management systems of both apps as untouched as possible, but enable one of them to rule over the other.
sergiu uttered the idea of a REST approach, which i turned into some kind of remote control for the xwiki user management.
so, whenever my forum admin want to have a new group, a new group is created in both systems, a space with the id [groupname] is created where only grup member have edit rights etc.
i attached an outline of that class.
that is, however, not the only way to do what you want, and possibly not even the most appropriate.
Yours
Thomas
shivshan schrieb:
Hi I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase. Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki, JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss. Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Shiva
Antonio Goncalves wrote:
Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is used between both applications.
Antonio
2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <[email protected]>:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
------------------------------ *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-
--
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws -- ontopica
Thomas Krämer
Krämer&Okpue GbR
Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn
Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/wws
-- ontopica
Thomas Krämer
Krämer&Okpue GbR
Kurfürstenstr. 66 53115 Bonn
Fon +49 228 - 180 99 737 Fax +49 228 - 242 78 60 Email [email protected]
You scare me with your brilliance Brian[sic]brain. The forum is greater for your words. Cheers, Mark On 19/04/2007, at 9:43 PM, THOMAS, BRIAN M ((ATTSI)) wrote:
Antonio:
This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I enjoy showing off my brilliance...
Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). We have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver with our XWiki instance. The integration of the three was limited to placing links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu. This has (I think) one small advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the appserver and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look mostly like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion, because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on each of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who didn't understand this.
If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a servlet filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of course.
The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space) it can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration needs. In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks. This was just a little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had it working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with Roller took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration of the ACEGI security package). JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its deployment.
brain[sic]
From: Antonio Goncalves [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi,
With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on various topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better" integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody installed such product ? Any feedback ?
Thanks,
Antonio
-- You receive this message as a subscriber of the xwiki- [email protected] mailing list. To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected] For general help: mailto:[email protected]?subject=help ObjectWeb mailing lists service home page: http://www.objectweb.org/ wws
Mark Robinson Regional Assistant Regional IT Manager - Asia Pacific TNT Freight Management Limited Mobile +852 9033 5711 [email protected]
Hi THOMAS, I have integrated xwiki with jforum using sso. I wanted that when user goes into jforum, user should not feel the difference in skins. how to have xwiki kind of skin in jforum and have same kind of panels in jforum like in xwiki. Thank you Jinoy.r -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Which-forum-to-use-with-XWiki-tf3597125.html#a10847641 Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
Jinoy: So far as I know only stylesheets were changed, but I didn't do the work, so I can't be sure. I do know that a fair similarity of appearance was obtained - sufficient to confuse users who didn't understand that though they were using the same authentication mechanism (a call from the server, with the username and password, to an enterprise application), they still needed to be registered in two places. brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: jinoy [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 28, 2007 11:02 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [xwiki-users] RE: Which forum to use with XWiki
Hi THOMAS,
I have integrated xwiki with jforum using sso. I wanted that when user goes into jforum, user should not feel the difference in skins. how to have xwiki kind of skin in jforum and have same kind of panels in jforum like in xwiki.
Thank you Jinoy.r
-- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Which-forum-to-use-with-XWiki-tf3597125. html#a10847641 Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
participants (7)
-
Antonio Goncalves -
Esbach, Brandon -
jinoy -
Mark Robinson -
shivshan -
Thomas Krämer -
THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI)