Lately I've been playing around with JotSpot, which is currently in beta. As Oliver previously reported it is a super-charged Wiki, offered as a hosted service.
Now I must admit that Wiki's are a thing that have largely passed me by. I knew what they were, but never really used one. Using JotSpot for little while however, makes me wonder why.
The concepts are delightfully simple (I think I've ranted about simplicity quite a number of times already) and work really well. Of course most of the concepts in JotSpot have been done elsewhere before. Since I have had very little exposure to Wikis I don't know which ones exactly, but the package put together by JotSpot is very impressive indeed.
The interface takes a large cue from GMail which is a good thing and features like built in XSLT support, scripting and external data objects (like up-to-date search results from Amazon or Google embedded in a page) will kick ass.
Unfortunately JotSpot is only available as a hosted service, which in my case is a damn shame. I now wish I had a locally installed version of it, to replace the blogging tool my current project is using for the documentation. All the same though, good job JotSpot!
The beta program will apparently run for the next few month. Beta-users get a discount if they subscribe when the service goes live. It can't hurt therefore to request an account and give it a whirl.
Glad you liked it. If you want to download something and install it and knowing that you are doing lots of stuff in Java I suggest taking a look at xwiki.org which is rather similar to JotSpot but downloadable.
Posted by: Oliver Thylmann | October 15, 2004 at 10:26 AM
I'm glad you're liking JotSpot. We've had a lot of requests for a locally installable version. We haven't committed to a particular approach yet, but it's likely that we'll have some kind of non-hosted solution. Please let us know if you have any other questions, and thanks for trying it out!
Posted by: Graham Spencer (JotSpot CTO) | October 16, 2004 at 07:55 AM
Xwiki is OK, but SnipSnap is way better (yes that was the first thing I checked after playing with JotSpot).
If you haven't tried SnipSnap Ollie, give it a go.
Of course a downloadable version of a JotSpot would really rock!
Posted by: Tao | October 16, 2004 at 12:59 PM