The perfect Wiki

Scot Hacker posted about his quest for the perfect Wiki yesterday. All sounds too familiar.

Ever since I tried JotSpot (which is very nice indeed) and found out that it is hosted-service-only I've been looking for a replacement. Due to my background I decided not to go for anything built in Perl or PHP but to look for one in Java.

Several rather decent alternatives popped up but the choice quickly narrowed down to XWiki and SnipSnap. Funnily enough they both use the same parsing engine, called Radeox, but there are very different in their approaches.

Both support using database backends for storage (MySQL, Oracle etc.) and both have a feature-list a mile long. Both also seems to be well designed and componentized, which makes tracing problems a lot easier.

The main difference however seems to be the approach to Wikis in general. XWiki is the "traditionalist" here, with WikiWords and even a TWiki plugins compatibility layer. SnipSnap seems to take a different approach. The developers "don't like" WikiWords and have their own linking syntax. Actually they have their own syntax for just about anything (not that there is one single standard for formatting). They also include their own application server as standard, although drop-in-and-go WAR-files are available to run with Tomcat also.

SnipSnap has a complete installer built in. No messing about. Just run run.sh and connect to localhost in your browser and off you go. A friendly wizard helps you to get started. It even provides sensible defaults and configuration "sets" tailored to specific uses, including security settings etc. Very nice.

Another thing that is different is that most of the configuration files (including the CSS!) are accessible from within the Wiki. This makes a lot of things easier.

XWiki on the other hand requires you to import a database to get started and then kind of drops you into the ocean. Compared to SnipSnap it seems to rely more heavily hacking files outside of its environment. This isn't really a problem of course, just another way of approach the issue.

XWiki also seems to be more integrated with the "Java-sphere": it can use Groovy (If you are a Perl/Python/Ruby-type person and ever felt like doing Java, but it seemed to hard or annoying, try Groovy!) and Velocity, does XML/RPC, uses Hibernate to store its data etc.

SnipSnap however is simply more polished all around.

Oh yeah, both are multilingual: SnipSnap is of german origin as it comes from the Fraunhofer instute (Yes, the MP3 guys) and XWiki seems to be of french descent. No I haven't tried chinese URLs.

Did I make a choice yet? Almost. I was about to go for SnipSnap, for its Mac-like way of doing things, but XWiki's list of features definately needs me to have a second, closer, look.

Will any of these become the MT of the Wiki World? Possibly.

If SnipSnap sorts out its Macro/plugin issues (no flames please, it really should be easier!) and adds more features (Forms support? WYSIWYG editing?) it might go far. It certainly wins on the friendly default interface it provides as well as the easy install.

XWiki should bribe Dave Shea to come up with a better default theme and matching templates. Developers should realize that saying "If you want something better, just edit XYZ-file and ABC-template etc." just doesn't cut it for most people. If it doesn't look kick-ass, most people will assume it probably isn't. In case of XWiki they'd be wrong, but they'll never know. Unfortunately the chances of Dave reading this and soliciting this bribe are slim...

In the end the best scenario would be if JotSpot would sell its software like MT does. I'd buy it if it was similarly priced to MT. Certainly not more. $99 would be excellent. In the end the singularity of vision behind it will take it places other Wiki tools might never reach.

Then again I wouldn't be surprise if JotSpot turns out to be a huge jumble of Spaghetti-alla-Perl. But then again, so is MT...

Update: Just a chat with XWiki's developer. He clarified a few things for me, so here we go:

• If XWiki is less polished, it is mainly due to time constraints. The whole thing is currently being built by one guy. Contributors are very welcome indeed.
  
• Just like JotSpot and SnipSnap XWiki is a business project.
  
• WikiWords aren't really supported as yet. You actually have put the link between [ ]'s. (I really need to look at it more!)
  
• A new theme is in the works.
  
• The Radeox engine (in case that wasn't clear) is actually a component of SnipSnap. In that sense the two projects share the same parser code. All whole structure of XWiki however is completely different, which is why XWiki can do structured stuff like forms etc.
  

Hopefully I'll have some time over the next couple of week to dig in to it. I'll post some more about it after that.

Comments

[Scot Hacker]

If XWiki is less polished, it is mainly due to time constraints. The whole thing is currently being built by one guy. Contributors are very welcome indeed.

That's an unfortunately common refrain in the open source world, and is pretty much exactly what leads to us having dozens of small projects without any real backing, and always in danger of dying from neglect, no matter how good they are at core.

Thanks for the review Tao - you definitely covered some territory that I didn't. Would be great if all this discussion started a meme that resulted in Six Apart or someone picking up the ball and filling this hole in wiki world.

[Doug Sharp]

Another java wiki option is Daisy:
http://new.cocoondev.org/daisy

I've just started working with Daisy 1.1, and although the infrastructure is cumbersome (JMS, Cocoon, etc.) its out-of-the-box approachability is very nice. Within a few minutes I was able to start a navigation menu, create a new page, and upload a Word doc. It also benefits from having a large organization behind it.

I'm working with XWiki to see how it stacks up against Daisy for my needs. I'm intrigued by the possibility that it could be implemented as a portlet, as is currently being tested with Exo. Wiki functionality seems a natural fit for portals.

Thanks for your review... it reaffirmed that I wasn't the only one that felt "dropped into the ocean" by XWiki. However, when you consider that it's been developed by one person, Ludovic Dubost, it's very impressive. Regardless of which I choose, I hope Ludovic eventually finds reward for his work.