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
Atlassian Confluence is finally on its first Beta. All great & sexy! Just check the new features, enhancements and bug fixes this release contains. Much more beyond the custom wiki concepts and thought/knowledge management systems...
Check the live demonstration yourself hosted on Atlassian, experience, enjoy and see the differences with all other such products :-)
Armond
It's a long time I've not written anything here. Busy enough not to read any news or blog recently... I'd planned to write about many things I've had experienced but time didn't allow me ;-) Ah, I've really missed my Blog. Hard not to write or share any thought:
The long story about upgrading to recent XWork / WebWork / SiteMesh with all those changes had occured during these 3-4 months. It was a complete rewrite of the project with the whole test cases somehow related to WW/XW ;-) But fortunately there were many kind people who helped me to do this upgrade... Patrick, Jason, Mathias, Matt and Joe were one of those guys and I would like to thank them all for their great support. It was not all painful upgrading process as I learned a lot too and now I have better view of these great products! Specially I like the new unified validation framework of XWork as well as how WebWork is dealing with the UI [velocity] components and the new action method accessor ($action). Man! I was also going to prepare an upgrade tutorial for WW/XW/SM (and still in my todo list) and write all of the mentioned points plusmuch more there but frankly have got no free time yet.
Not to mention the Spring framework we've newly integrated into the project as our new lightweight container which is doing via IOC indeed :-) Nice, neat, simple yet powerful and flexible resource management/access as well as good implementation of IOC make it a layer with no overhead or obvious impact. Even no "Aware" interfaces like how XWork was dealing with... Once you applied Spring on your project, you can easily forget this layer as of being a super invisible one with no interface or even style forcing! All you have, are some XML configuration files describing the component graph and dependencies... Nothing More ;-)
As I'd mentioned in my previous postings, BluPlusPlus is my little skin for JAlbum which I'm working on as an entertainment and I love it! :-) Definitely I'm using it to make digital album of my photos here. Quite a lot of fun to eat from my own dog's food! Well, no need to mention the java based scripting language it's using - BeanShell and perhaps the main reason to keep me going on! It's a totally different experience.
The good news is that BluPlusPlus is not only the top most downloaded (around 2000 downloads so far) and the highest rated skin available on JRepository but recently has found the way to get pre-bundled with JAlbum. It has got a lot of attractions on open community too and officially a community is working on it (both on implementation part as well as the documentation!)... I could never imagine such a progress on day one I started it as it was totally a personal and entertainment project was being done in my spare time (if I could get any!).
Ahhh, I had lot of unwritten stuffs in my mind that I totally forgot my birthday and why I've started to write this post! Yes... it's the second of December and I've hit 25 which is hard to believe. Over the past year, I experienced many fundamental changes both in my private and business life :-) Most of them were positive hopefully and I'm happy with them! More friends as I've got involved in new communities and virtual places as well as the new company I started working for, better opportunities, more chances to learn and experience both in my technical and nontechnical lives, were all brilliant! And perhaps the best prize which could satisfied me although there is a long way to the ideal and the story still goes on and on and on..........
H A P P Y----B I R T H D A Y----T O----M E
Armond