e enjte shtator 23, 2004

Tonight I ate sushis with a bunch of java open source developers based in Paris. I was very happy to discover that we are so many in Paris. Vincent Massol has set up a Yahoo Group for us: the Open Source GetTogether Parisien. We meet the third thursday of every month. Feel free to join the group if you're interested. We also have a wiki (xWiki based) hosted by Ludo (the old Confluence based wiki, hosted by Vincent should not be used as I have understood.

Usually it seems we gather at Pivolis, Vincent's company, where we have one project presentation, after which we go for dinner outside. Yesterday Vincent couldn't come so we just had dinner.

Exciting news about maven 2.0 plans: no more jelly, all plugins as pojos, so you can reuse them in your app outside of ant or maven, reimplement all ant tasks as pojos, finally a classloader hierarchy. Cool stuff!

Exo Platform Portal integrated xwiki as a portlet, started implementing a JSR 170 container (Java Content Repository API) and will announce some exciting news soon (can't talk about it yet). Craig McClanahan, who created Struts and JSF is in Paris these days: I invited Benjamin on monday to meet with him because Exo Portal's architecture is all based on JSF, and I think is a very cool demo of JSF's power as a MVC framework.

xWiki made great progress over the past few months. Ludo improved the presentation and UI a lot, all XHTML and CSS based, created a nice URLFactory that makes Portal integration much easier, has now PDF export, with links going inside the PDF, blog and RSS export support. But the most interesteing feature of xWiki is its scripting support: xWiki is a development platform: in a wiki page you can define objects, that get stored in the database (all automatic), then write forms, in velocity or Groovy. If a regular Wiki is like Word on the net platform, xWiki adds to it Access and Excel. I predict that this very promising application development platform will take off as soon as people start creating compelling applications on top of it. xWiki takes what Clay Shirky calls Situated Software to the next level of easiness: edit page, write script, play with app (no fuss with database schema scripts, compiling and stuff). The inclusion of Groovy and Velocity, a scripting and a template language, for this platform, also reminds me of Paul Graham's argument in his most excellent Hackers and Painters, about the competitive advantage of dynamically typed language (so called scripting languages) running in an interpreter over statically typed ones that need to be compiled: Ludo when do you include LISP as a scripting language in xWiki?-)

Benjamin has a nice section about xWiki in his last august Exo Reloaded TSS article. What I find interesting is the idea of using xWiki's generic Hibernate content store as the base for a JSR 170 content repository implementation.

Also beyond the product itself there starts to be some very interesting uses of xWiki on the net:

• AgoraWiki is about politics (sorry it's only in french for now). Create a proposal as a wiki entry, discuss it by editing it, then vote on it. I find it a very good way to reengage citizens in the democratic process (2 years ago in France people did not participate enough in the first round of presidential election and the second round featured the leader of the extreme right local party, which had never happened before). If one day we see a proposal from this wiki get 500 000 or 1 million votes, the politics will be obliged to take it into account. There are already a few french politics blogging (the only one I've read is Dominique Strauss-Kahn).
• PauseTechnique.com a hilarious collaborative photo gallery featuring ictures of tired people taking a break (sorry the site is only in french).
• xwiki.com, Ludovic's for pay wiki hosting site, hosting 239 wikis for now, with 100 000 page views already (33k for this month only), which proves the scalability of the product.

A few pics of the gang.

Benji showing Ludo Exo Platform Portal on his new Nokia. Ludo's xWiki is integrated as a portlet in Exo's Community menu but not on the mobile version of the Portal. We also tried to upload the pictures I took from my Treo web browser to one of Ludo's xWiki powered photo album sites (pausetechnique.com is a good example), but the Treo browser does not implement file uploads:-(

From left to right: Francois Le Droff, Herve Mignot (when do you start a weblog Herve?-)), Guillaume Laforge (Groovy), Emmanuel Venisse (Maven and a bunch of other projects)

From left to right: Ludovic Dubost (xWiki), Benjamin Mestrallet (Exo Platform Portal - Benjamin a weblog would help promoting Exo beyond TheServerSide audience), Arnaud Heritier (Maven), Francois Le Droff (Many jakarta projects)

posted from my treo (enhanced the next day from my desktop)

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