Hi all, JSPWiki is presently nicely configured for (1) those who already
know what they're doing and have JSPWiki in production already, but can
be problematic for (2) newbie evaluators who just want to place a WAR in
the Tomcat and see what JSPWiki looks like and (3) newbie patch
submitters who have to do debugging but are annoyed at needing to
re-enter configuration, authorization and test page info everytime they
want to deploy a new WAR. I believe OOTB configuration should be better
suited for (2) and (3) as the users in (1) already know how to configure
their jspwiki.properties/jspwiki.properties.impl files and nearly
invariably have to do so anyway for their production deployments.
I was thinking we should maybe update our jspwiki.properties.impl file
with the following changes:
-jspwiki.baseURL=
+jspwiki.baseURL=http://localhost:8080/JSPWiki
-#jspwiki.workDir =
+jspwiki.workDir = myJSPWikiDir
-jspwiki.fileSystemProvider.pageDir = @pagedir@
+jspwiki.fileSystemProvider.pageDir = myJSPWikiDir/p/web/www-data/jspwiki/
-jspwiki.basicAttachmentProvider.storageDir = @pagedir@
+jspwiki.basicAttachmentProvider.storageDir =
myJSPWikiDir/p/web/www-data/jspwiki/
For incoming newbies in (2), we have a narrow window when they're
evaluating a Wiki for their corporate intranets and anything we can do
to shrink the soap opera between generating a WAR and viewing it from
their local Tomcat would be a good thing. Here, all we have to say is
generate the WAR (if they haven't downloaded it anyway from the
distribution) and dump in their local Tomcat and they can view it at
http://localhost:8080/JSPWiki and they're done. Couldn't be simpler.
While a URL of http://localhost:8080/JSPWiki may not work for *all*
newbies, it's far and away the most common URL for someone prototyping
on their local machine with Tomcat, sharply reducing the % who will
still need to configure the jspwiki.properties file.
Also, combining all files that JSPWiki creates into one place
"myJSPWikiDir" (or whatever you'd want to call it) that Tomcat nicely
creates in the user's home folder helps them easily see all of JSPWiki's
internal moving parts while remaining fully comfortable that JSPWiki
isn't dumping files in system folders that they're going to have trouble
finding and cleaning out later. It's uncomfortable/unnerving to
newcomers to see OOTB JSPWiki placing files in the "/p/web/..." of their
root system drive (a folder system the average user might not have
permission to anyway), especially for something they're just evaluating
locally.
For developers in (3), these above settings work great for me during
testing and debugging on my local standalone Tomcat, I just need to drop
the generated WAR in Tomcat each time I do an "ant war" without needing
to bother to reconfigure the jspwiki.properties file each time. This,
however, took me quite a while to figure out on my own and I'd like to
have this setup OOTB for any quick patch submitter without them needing
to go through similar initial headaches.
Regards,
Glen
