Recently I've had some good experiences on the avialble java-based wiki rendering engines and Radeox at the top of the list.
It's totally a great joy to work with straight forward API of Radeox as well as customizing its built-in features (filters and macros actually) and adding new facilities! Although at some cases I kinda feel that it's only designed for SnipSnap, its main playground. Examples are some SnipSnap-specific filters and macros pre-bundled with as well as some of its general interfaces and abstract classes living at the foundation layer of the engine not being so flexible to cover all possible cases. Thanks to its license type, being all open source makes it all possible to customize and adapt to fulfill your needs.
After all I still consider it as the number one at this field! Still couldn't find anything better...
Well, just a couple of days ago, I was for adding a cool feature to the engine. YES! Inline importing of RSS feeds in a wiki page :-) Just a matter of adding a new macro to fetch whatever information needed from the net and displaying them. Then I came into the RSS feeds fetching and dealing with different versions and formats of them. Well, another open source tool which does the job quite well. Many of you may already know about it... Yes! I'm talking about Informa, one of the best and eldest libraries in this regard which is getting developed from a long time ago... It was matter of months I knew it, even have read the documentations and taken a look at its API but never done any practical job with. After starting the job and developing most of it, my first impression was just like WOW!! How cool and simple it's dealing with different RSSes and what nice features it provides to extract whatever information you need from the feed :-) Of course I used it for just reading and parsing the feeds but it's providing much more by adding support for feed creation too (whatever version you desire). Straight forward API and hiding the details of parsing and dealing with the available versions nowadays are two of the pros which I'm strictly for! And Informa does them all quite well.
I was almost done, just some velocity templates to place the feeds information on theright place and caching, for improving the performance and preventing feed fetching everytime the wiki was rendered, were all I needed to add to completely resolve the whole issue ;-)
Having good enough, layered and aspected design for the components and libraries makes the integration and incorporation phase all painless and without flaws! And good tools always obey these simple rules... All perfect!
Ah, btw, I guess this will be my last post of 2003, as the new year is coming and I can feel it easily! It's all here just a few hours away... Let me take this great opportunity and wish you all the best, perfect and glorious moments at New Year eve and hope you have prosperous, healthy and happy New Year :-)
*** Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2004 ***
Armond
Posted by armond at December 31, 2003 04:39 PMHi Armond,
I am working on a Blog now. I downloaded several tools/api's and finally found the Informa the best. I agree with you that it's really easy and light. The only problem that I faced with it was that after I finished almost 95% of the work, it realized that it doesn't have an exporter for RSS 2.0
I wrote a small class for it ofcourse, with enough implementation for my needs (not more). If anyone needs it, I can send it across...
Take care,
-Sami
Sure I want the code if you mind to share it :-) Great thanks!
Does it also read and parse RSS2? Or you've just gone for the feed generation?
We may want to add RSS2 support to Confluence so I guess I'll need your code ;-)
Armond
Posted by: Armond Avanes at May 5, 2004 06:51 PMJuuupi!
Posted by: mature moms at July 20, 2004 05:15 AMThanks for info!
Posted by: Asians at July 22, 2004 01:01 AM