Dear Derek, Thanks for your question. It really made me focus on what it is exactly that we need.
It is so very hard to figure out what open source project to incorporate and which not to. There are generally many competitors, and no one has a really good perspective on all of them. The advocates of every particular project, who are busy investing so much of their own time, will generally advocate their own project completely. So it makes it very hard to determine which path to go down. I have gotten away from complete technical reviews (which we do not have time for) and have fallen back to relying on my intuition - which is flawed, but at least fast. We are blessed with little funding and tight deadlines :-) But we are trying to prove that an open source project can be developed by a government agency. I know most of you have never heard of the United States Institute of Peace (http://www.usip.org). But you will ;-) Below are the things I can think of that what would be present in an ideal wiki for us to incorporate. We are using a less than ideal system (as described in bullet point 3) but its functional. 1.) I want something that is completely easy to install. Note: JSPWiki is easy to install (at least for me). I have had no time getting it run on my stack. 2.) I want something that can just display one page with no adornment other than the body text. Perhaps this is possible, but it looks like its going to take some fiddling. 3.) I want pages that we can pre-load with data easily before the wiki is every called. When people create simulations they may put starting text in some of the documents that the players will work on. Currently we use MySQL as a database, and so working with a very simple text editor, I can just allow CRUD operations on the stuff from the database and all is well, and all is done. 4.) Ideally, I want a wiki where I can control the persistence layer. We are doing online training simulations and trying to capture as much of the interactions as possible in the database. This will make it easy for play back and analysis. We are integrating many tools into this project and if we start allowing the data to slip into many different places, we will have lots of problems down the road. 5.) I want a wiki that works, like google shared docs seems to, to handle transparently the issue of multiple people editing at once. (I know this is asking for a lot.) Baring that, I want something that can warn a user if someone else (who may have authenticated - see #6 below - with the same user name) is editing. 6.) I want a system where our application can log in, and then users of the system just have to get by our own internal authentication. 7.) Ultimately we want a system that we can just call up a page based on its URL (ending in something like 'mydatabase_789') and have document '789' which is associated with the 'mydatabase' schema pop up, and have in it any starting text that the simulation author desired. It is quite a wish list. Which is why we are probably going to stick with the simple but functional system that we have for quite a while to come. But as I stated in my first email, I applaud your effort and look forward to the day we integrate your wiki into our project. Best, Skip http://www.usip.org "It should be our pride to teach ourselves as well as we can always to speak and write as simply and clearly and unpretentiously as possible, and to avoid like the plague the appearance of possessing knowledge which is too deep to be clearly and simply expressed." -- Karl Popper ________________________________________ From: Derek Hohls [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 4:11 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: wish lists Skip I, like others I am sure, am curious as to exactly what features you think that JSPWIKI "will need to develop a bit more"? If you need more control over document editing, it might be worth considering a CMS (content management system). If you want to stick with a JAVA/Tomcat stack, then some examples are: http://www.hippocms.org/ http://www.dotcms.org/ http://www.alfresco.com/ Alfresco, for example, offers "drag and drop" functionality for document management - see: http://www.alfresco.com/products/dm/ >>> On 2009/03/19 at 07:35, in message <[email protected]>, "Cole, Ronald" <[email protected]> wrote: Dear JSPWiki Community, Just want you all to know that we are rooting for you. I manage an open source project myself. We are creating a way for non-programmers to create multi-player online training simulations. (see opensimplatform.org for details) We need a good document editing tool to allow players to work on documents together. This is kind of tricky since one has to point to the document by the specific database and document id of it. We are using a very simple, but functional, WYSIWYG editor right now (openWYSIWYG 1.0). I*d like to have more features than what we have now, specifically the ability to prevent players from clobbering each other*s edits, but ease of installation is a big deal for us. Right now all we have to do is copy the files up, and boom its installed. We are working on an apache/tomcat stack already, so I would rather use JSPWIKI than a php based wiki, but from what I*m seeing, JSPWIKI will need to develop a bit more before we can just *pop* it in. So please keep up your good work! You are making my life, and the lives of many other people, better. :-) Best, Skip -- This message is subject to the CSIR's copyright terms and conditions, e-mail legal notice, and implemented Open Document Format (ODF) standard. The full disclaimer details can be found at http://www.csir.co.za/disclaimer.html. This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. MailScanner thanks Transtec Computers for their support.
