Merging with XWiki and WikiModel

[Jason van Zyl-2]

Howdy,

I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following  
the work that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has  
made some attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and  
WikiModel. You can see the proposal here:

http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence

I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that  
reporting is removed from core and just becomes another set of  
components. Having Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the  
next couple releases of the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on  
Doxia will be removed. This will open the door for anyone who wants to  
add a different mechanism. Doxia reports will still work, I'm not  
planning on removing the functionality just unbinding it from the  
core. But that opens the door for something new!

What I personally think the best path would be is to help what Vincent  
has started. There are really only three people here who work on  
Doxia, the releases are very slow in coming and I think you would  
immediately double or triple the size of the team merging with the  
XWiki folks and getting the WikiModel developer as well. This is what  
the XWiki folks do all the time and I think you would get some more  
velocity in the progress of the project as a whole. Vincent is using  
Plexus for his stuff so it's not that wildly different but I think you  
would get more visibility over there and a higher degree of  
collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is more  
complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.

Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this list.

Thanks,

Jason

----------------------------------------------------------
Jason van Zyl
Founder,  Apache Maven
jason at sonatype dot com
----------------------------------------------------------

People develop abstractions by generalizing from concrete examples.
Every attempt to determine the correct abstraction on paper without
actually developing a running system is doomed to failure. No one
is that smart. A framework is a resuable design, so you develop it by
looking at the things it is supposed to be a design of. The more  
examples
you look at, the more general your framework will be.

   -- Ralph Johnson & Don Roberts, Patterns for Evolving Frameworks

[Vincent Siveton]

Hi Jason,

2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:

> Howdy,
>
> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following the work
> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made some
> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and WikiModel. You
> can see the proposal here:
>
> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
>
> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that reporting
> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components. Having

I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see MNG-3402.

> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple releases of
> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed. This will
> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism. Doxia
> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the functionality just
> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something new!

Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
- how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
- what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?

> What I personally think the best path would be is to help what Vincent has
> started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia, the
> releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately double or

Agree but we work when we have time :)
@Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?
After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.

> triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and getting the
> WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all the time
> and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the project
> as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that wildly
> different but I think you would get more visibility over there and a higher

The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki umbrella,
so do you plan to do it?

@Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?

Cheers,

Vincent

> degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is more
> complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
>
> Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this list.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jason
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Jason van Zyl
> Founder,  Apache Maven
> jason at sonatype dot com
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
> People develop abstractions by generalizing from concrete examples.
> Every attempt to determine the correct abstraction on paper without
> actually developing a running system is doomed to failure. No one
> is that smart. A framework is a resuable design, so you develop it by
> looking at the things it is supposed to be a design of. The more examples
> you look at, the more general your framework will be.
>
>  -- Ralph Johnson & Don Roberts, Patterns for Evolving Frameworks
>
>

[Jason van Zyl-5]

On 30-Jan-09, at 3:04 PM, Vincent Siveton wrote:

> Hi Jason,
>
> 2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following  
>> the work
>> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made  
>> some
>> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and  
>> WikiModel. You
>> can see the proposal here:
>>
>> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
>>
>> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that  
>> reporting
>> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components.  
>> Having
>
> I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
> We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see MNG-3402.
>
>> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple  
>> releases of
>> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed.  
>> This will
>> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism.  
>> Doxia
>> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the  
>> functionality just
>> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something  
>> new!
>
> Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
> - how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?

As a completely separate execution environment. So the plugin manager  
in 3.x will only deal with build plugins. Then a separate plugin  
manager can be created for Doxia based reports and those will map to  
the current reporting element. Then I would like to create another  
execution environment for a more data centric report model.

>
> - what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?
>

I will make the basic support to start but my interest lies in a data  
centric model for reporting. The more document centric approach I  
think has progressed further in XWiki and WikiModel. I would  
personally like to feed the data collected into something simple for  
producing reports.

>> What I personally think the best path would be is to help what  
>> Vincent has
>> started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia,  
>> the
>> releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately  
>> double or
>
> Agree but we work when we have time :)

Sure, but I think you would benefit by having a team that is focused  
on this full-time. I don't see any downside as then your additional  
part-time efforts help something that the XWiki folks are working on  
all the time.

>
> @Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?
> After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.
>
>> triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and  
>> getting the
>> WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all  
>> the time
>> and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the  
>> project
>> as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that  
>> wildly
>> different but I think you would get more visibility over there and  
>> a higher
>
> The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki umbrella,
> so do you plan to do it?

I don't work on Doxia so I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to  
focus on data production and once I do that I'll figure out how I'm  
going to produce reports. I think there are good things in Doxia,  
XWiki, and WikiModel so a hybrid of the three systems is probably the  
best path forward.

>
>
> @Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Vincent
>
>> degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is  
>> more
>> complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
>>
>> Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this  
>> list.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Jason
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>> Jason van Zyl
>> Founder,  Apache Maven
>> jason at sonatype dot com
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> People develop abstractions by generalizing from concrete examples.
>> Every attempt to determine the correct abstraction on paper without
>> actually developing a running system is doomed to failure. No one
>> is that smart. A framework is a resuable design, so you develop it by
>> looking at the things it is supposed to be a design of. The more  
>> examples
>> you look at, the more general your framework will be.
>>
>> -- Ralph Johnson & Don Roberts, Patterns for Evolving Frameworks
>>
>>

Thanks,

Jason

----------------------------------------------------------
Jason van Zyl
Founder,  Apache Maven
jason at sonatype dot com
----------------------------------------------------------

You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in.
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.
They know it is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically
dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of
dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or
goals are in doubt.

   -- Robert Pirzig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[vmassol]

Hi there,

On Jan 31, 2009, at 12:04 AM, Vincent Siveton wrote:

> Hi Jason,
>
> 2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following  
>> the work
>> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made  
>> some
>> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and  
>> WikiModel. You
>> can see the proposal here:
>>
>> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
>>
>> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that  
>> reporting
>> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components.  
>> Having
>
> I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
> We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see MNG-3402.
>
>> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple  
>> releases of
>> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed.  
>> This will
>> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism.  
>> Doxia
>> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the  
>> functionality just
>> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something  
>> new!
>
> Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
> - how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
> - what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?
>
>> What I personally think the best path would be is to help what  
>> Vincent has
>> started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia,  
>> the
>> releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately  
>> double or
>
> Agree but we work when we have time :)
> @Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?
> After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.
>
>> triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and  
>> getting the
>> WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all  
>> the time
>> and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the  
>> project
>> as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that  
>> wildly
>> different but I think you would get more visibility over there and  
>> a higher
>
> The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki umbrella,
> so do you plan to do it?
>
> @Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?

Let me explain the point of view of the xwiki community (I hope I'm  
summarizing it well here):

* XWiki is not a wiki. It's a platform offering wiki components to  
develop any type of content-centric web application based on the wiki  
paradigm.

* We've started reorganizing ourselves to implement this vision back  
in 2007. We've started by decoupling our monolithic code into modules  
and components (using Plexus).

* We're not finding that there are some important pieces that we want  
to make top level projects, independent of the other xwiki modules/
components. For the moment we have identified 2 pieces:
   - the rendering engine
   - our brand new GWT-based WYSIWYG editor

* We could propose these under new projects at the ASF for example.  
These are the reasons preventing us from doing so right now:
   - we'd like to promote the XWiki project name as the place where to  
get wiki "components". If we start splitting the rendering engine or  
the wysiwyg editor we won't achieve this
   - having to implement and support several projects (the xwiki one +  
the engine one at ASF + the wysiwyg one wherever else  
(@code.google.org for ex)) is going to spread our committer base thin  
achieving the opposite as what we want to achieve which is making all  
people interested on working on wiki "components" together.
   - we have a very good infrastructure team and we completely host  
all our tools. We like it this way since it's real fast and it works  
real well and we can only complain to ourselves if something is not  
right and we can fix it right away. Note that the infra is paid by  
XWiki SAS (a company offering services on top of the xwiki oss project  
- See http://tinyurl.com/7c488p for more details)
- basically we can work faster if the code is on the xwiki svn

It's possible that one day we'll propose the whole project to the ASF  
but I don't think we're ready for that yet. For the moment we like it  
the way we are able to progress fast and we don't feel the need.

Note that xwiki projects are currently under the LGPL but we can  
discuss making the new rendering engine (which would be the merge  
between doxia, xwiki and wikimodel ) under the ASL if you feel this is  
better.

Now why are we interested in merging them all? Actually that wasn't  
our idea. It was Jason's. We were fine developing and progressing fast  
on our own xwiki rendering engine. But at the same time it's true that  
I've realized it was a pity that XWiki/WikiModel and Doxia are re-
developing the same things instead of collaborating and working on  
building something together. So I see 2 win-win advantages for us all:
- for Doxia this can be a way to make it live on and be active again,  
with even more features and better support
- for XWiki we would love to get some new committers on board to help  
us with the rendering engine (we currently have about 3 committers  
active on it either full time or part time). In addition the merge  
between these 3 engines (xwiki/wikimodel/doxia) would create a new  
rendering engine that could easily be the best rendering engine on the  
web. For us one advantage would be to spread the xwiki name even more  
and thus get more contributors and users of the xwiki "components" and  
applications.

Last, while I see it very interesting to everyone to perform this  
merge, I can understand if some people would prefer to continue  
working on what they do on their side without merging. That's fine and  
I'm not going to fight for doing the merge at all cost. Especially  
since doing the merge is going to be costly for us in term of time/
effort. For it to be worthwhile we must all agree to it and like the  
idea.

So what happens if the merge isn't done? On the xwiki side we'll  
continue to improve our rendering engine fast (we're progressing very  
fast right now since we have very active committers and since the  
rendering is actively used in all the xwiki applications this will  
continue). Even though we have a Doxia bridge we're not using it for  
different reasons but one of them is that the Doxia parsers we've  
tried were not good enough. I remember trying the confluence one and  
it was very buggy. So I was just waiting for the need to use the  
confluence parser to arise before rewriting it using wikimodel (it's a  
one day job at max to get a very strong parser, thanks to wikimodel  
tools).

Merging has its share or work required on both sides but it's the best  
option in the end IMO. Now it's for you to decide if this has enough  
interest for Doxia.

Cheers,
-Vincent

PS: If you want to see how the xwiki project is managed read  http://tinyurl.com/7c488p 
  and go to http://dev.xwiki.org which contains all our dev practices

> Cheers,
>
> Vincent
>
>> degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is  
>> more
>> complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
>>
>> Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this  
>> list.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Jason

[dennisl-2]

Vincent Siveton wrote:

> Hi Jason,
>
> 2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following the work
>> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made some
>> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and WikiModel. You
>> can see the proposal here:
>>
>> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
>>
>> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that reporting
>> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components. Having
>
> I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
> We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see MNG-3402.
>
>> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple releases of
>> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed. This will
>> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism. Doxia
>> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the functionality just
>> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something new!
>
> Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
> - how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
> - what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?
>
>> What I personally think the best path would be is to help what Vincent has
>> started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia, the
>> releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately double or
>
> Agree but we work when we have time :)
> @Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?

There are only two things left now:

1. Add a Clirr report to make sure we didn't break anything
2. Advertise a Doxia/Site Plugin combo SNAPSHOT version to the community
to allow testing for a little while

I hope to be able to finish that this week.

> After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.
>
>> triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and getting the
>> WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all the time
>> and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the project
>> as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that wildly
>> different but I think you would get more visibility over there and a higher
>
> The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki umbrella,
> so do you plan to do it?
>
> @Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Vincent
>
>> degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is more
>> complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
>>
>> Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this list.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Jason
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>> Jason van Zyl
>> Founder,  Apache Maven
>> jason at sonatype dot com
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> People develop abstractions by generalizing from concrete examples.
>> Every attempt to determine the correct abstraction on paper without
>> actually developing a running system is doomed to failure. No one
>> is that smart. A framework is a resuable design, so you develop it by
>> looking at the things it is supposed to be a design of. The more examples
>> you look at, the more general your framework will be.
>>
>>  -- Ralph Johnson & Don Roberts, Patterns for Evolving Frameworks
>>
>>
>

--
Dennis Lundberg

[Hervé BOUTEMY]

Vincent,

After our discussion on IRC, I perfectly understand how we could benefit from
convergence in the domain of document parsing and rendering, with the
advantage of not only more developpers, but more users too, then more tests.

Vincent Siveton did a great job with an Eclipse plugin that was integrated in
m2eclipse, but:
- this is only Eclipse-centric, how about other IDE's?
- it would still need a lot of work to continue improve it (it actually helps
me a lot when editing pages, no show-stopper bugs: only minor things)
>    - our brand new GWT-based WYSIWYG editor
Is there something in XWiki to help editing pages that are on local disk (and
stored in svn)? Would this GWT-based WYSIWYG editor help here? Or is it only
web-centric?

Regards,

Hervé

Le lundi 02 février 2009, Vincent Massol a écrit :

> Hi there,
>
> On Jan 31, 2009, at 12:04 AM, Vincent Siveton wrote:
> > Hi Jason,
> >
> > 2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:
> >> Howdy,
> >>
> >> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following
> >> the work
> >> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made
> >> some
> >> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and
> >> WikiModel. You
> >> can see the proposal here:
> >>
> >> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
> >>
> >> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that
> >> reporting
> >> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components.
> >> Having
> >
> > I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
> > We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see MNG-3402.
> >
> >> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple
> >> releases of
> >> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed.
> >> This will
> >> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism.
> >> Doxia
> >> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the
> >> functionality just
> >> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something
> >> new!
> >
> > Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
> > - how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
> > - what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?
> >
> >> What I personally think the best path would be is to help what
> >> Vincent has
> >> started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia,
> >> the
> >> releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately
> >> double or
> >
> > Agree but we work when we have time :)
> > @Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?
> > After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.
> >
> >> triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and
> >> getting the
> >> WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all
> >> the time
> >> and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the
> >> project
> >> as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that
> >> wildly
> >> different but I think you would get more visibility over there and
> >> a higher
> >
> > The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki umbrella,
> > so do you plan to do it?
> >
> > @Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?
>
> Let me explain the point of view of the xwiki community (I hope I'm
> summarizing it well here):
>
> * XWiki is not a wiki. It's a platform offering wiki components to
> develop any type of content-centric web application based on the wiki
> paradigm.
>
> * We've started reorganizing ourselves to implement this vision back
> in 2007. We've started by decoupling our monolithic code into modules
> and components (using Plexus).
>
> * We're not finding that there are some important pieces that we want
> to make top level projects, independent of the other xwiki modules/
> components. For the moment we have identified 2 pieces:
>    - the rendering engine
>    - our brand new GWT-based WYSIWYG editor
>
> * We could propose these under new projects at the ASF for example.
> These are the reasons preventing us from doing so right now:
>    - we'd like to promote the XWiki project name as the place where to
> get wiki "components". If we start splitting the rendering engine or
> the wysiwyg editor we won't achieve this
>    - having to implement and support several projects (the xwiki one +
> the engine one at ASF + the wysiwyg one wherever else
> (@code.google.org for ex)) is going to spread our committer base thin
> achieving the opposite as what we want to achieve which is making all
> people interested on working on wiki "components" together.
>    - we have a very good infrastructure team and we completely host
> all our tools. We like it this way since it's real fast and it works
> real well and we can only complain to ourselves if something is not
> right and we can fix it right away. Note that the infra is paid by
> XWiki SAS (a company offering services on top of the xwiki oss project
> - See http://tinyurl.com/7c488p for more details)
> - basically we can work faster if the code is on the xwiki svn
>
> It's possible that one day we'll propose the whole project to the ASF
> but I don't think we're ready for that yet. For the moment we like it
> the way we are able to progress fast and we don't feel the need.
>
> Note that xwiki projects are currently under the LGPL but we can
> discuss making the new rendering engine (which would be the merge
> between doxia, xwiki and wikimodel ) under the ASL if you feel this is
> better.
>
> Now why are we interested in merging them all? Actually that wasn't
> our idea. It was Jason's. We were fine developing and progressing fast
> on our own xwiki rendering engine. But at the same time it's true that
> I've realized it was a pity that XWiki/WikiModel and Doxia are re-
> developing the same things instead of collaborating and working on
> building something together. So I see 2 win-win advantages for us all:
> - for Doxia this can be a way to make it live on and be active again,
> with even more features and better support
> - for XWiki we would love to get some new committers on board to help
> us with the rendering engine (we currently have about 3 committers
> active on it either full time or part time). In addition the merge
> between these 3 engines (xwiki/wikimodel/doxia) would create a new
> rendering engine that could easily be the best rendering engine on the
> web. For us one advantage would be to spread the xwiki name even more
> and thus get more contributors and users of the xwiki "components" and
> applications.
>
> Last, while I see it very interesting to everyone to perform this
> merge, I can understand if some people would prefer to continue
> working on what they do on their side without merging. That's fine and
> I'm not going to fight for doing the merge at all cost. Especially
> since doing the merge is going to be costly for us in term of time/
> effort. For it to be worthwhile we must all agree to it and like the
> idea.
>
> So what happens if the merge isn't done? On the xwiki side we'll
> continue to improve our rendering engine fast (we're progressing very
> fast right now since we have very active committers and since the
> rendering is actively used in all the xwiki applications this will
> continue). Even though we have a Doxia bridge we're not using it for
> different reasons but one of them is that the Doxia parsers we've
> tried were not good enough. I remember trying the confluence one and
> it was very buggy. So I was just waiting for the need to use the
> confluence parser to arise before rewriting it using wikimodel (it's a
> one day job at max to get a very strong parser, thanks to wikimodel
> tools).
>
> Merging has its share or work required on both sides but it's the best
> option in the end IMO. Now it's for you to decide if this has enough
> interest for Doxia.
>
> Cheers,
> -Vincent
>
> PS: If you want to see how the xwiki project is managed read
> http://tinyurl.com/7c488p and go to http://dev.xwiki.org which contains all
> our dev practices
>
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Vincent
> >
> >> degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is
> >> more
> >> complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
> >>
> >> Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this
> >> list.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Jason

[Hervé BOUTEMY]

I'm cross-posting this between Doxia and Maven dev lists, because this has
both interests.

Le samedi 31 janvier 2009, Jason van Zyl a écrit :

> On 30-Jan-09, at 3:04 PM, Vincent Siveton wrote:
> > Hi Jason,
> >
> > 2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:
> >> Howdy,
> >>
> >> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following
> >> the work
> >> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made
> >> some
> >> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and
> >> WikiModel. You
> >> can see the proposal here:
> >>
> >> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
> >>
> >> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that
> >> reporting
> >> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components.
> >> Having
> >
> > I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
> > We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see MNG-3402.
> >
> >> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple
> >> releases of
> >> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed.
> >> This will
> >> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism.
> >> Doxia
> >> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the
> >> functionality just
> >> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something
> >> new!
> >
> > Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
> > - how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
>
> As a completely separate execution environment. So the plugin manager
> in 3.x will only deal with build plugins. Then a separate plugin
> manager can be created for Doxia based reports and those will map to
> the current reporting element. Then I would like to create another
> execution environment for a more data centric report model.

the idea is interesting.
Is there something somewhere on this? How can I help?
The key plugin is maven-site-plugin: a new branch?

Regards,

Hervé

[vmassol]

Hi Herve,

On Mar 8, 2009, at 2:53 PM, Hervé BOUTEMY wrote:

> Vincent,
>
> After our discussion on IRC, I perfectly understand how we could  
> benefit from
> convergence in the domain of document parsing and rendering, with the
> advantage of not only more developpers, but more users too, then  
> more tests.

yep.

Regarding tests we have more than 900 unit tests overall for the XWiki  
Rendering engine. This is absolutely needed because parsing/rendering  
seems an easy task but it's really complex when you tackle edge cases.  
We would never have been able to code a strong bi-directional wiki <--
 > XHTML conversion without these tests.

> Vincent Siveton did a great job with an Eclipse plugin that was  
> integrated in
> m2eclipse, but:
> - this is only Eclipse-centric, how about other IDE's?
> - it would still need a lot of work to continue improve it (it  
> actually helps
> me a lot when editing pages, no show-stopper bugs: only minor things)
>>   - our brand new GWT-based WYSIWYG editor
> Is there something in XWiki to help editing pages that are on local  
> disk (and
> stored in svn)?

There's a Storage interface. Currently we have one implementation for  
Hibernate and another for JCR. It's possible to add one SVN but nobody  
has been working on this.
Re local disk, I guess the JCR implementation could be used for that.

> Would this GWT-based WYSIWYG editor help here? Or is it only
> web-centric?

The WYSIWYG editor is a web-based editor of course but it takes its  
content from any XHTML content (which can be generated by the XWiki  
Rendering from any source).

Thanks
-Vincent

> Regards,
>
> Hervé
>
> Le lundi 02 février 2009, Vincent Massol a écrit :
>> Hi there,
>>
>> On Jan 31, 2009, at 12:04 AM, Vincent Siveton wrote:
>>> Hi Jason,
>>>
>>> 2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:
>>>> Howdy,
>>>>
>>>> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following
>>>> the work
>>>> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made
>>>> some
>>>> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and
>>>> WikiModel. You
>>>> can see the proposal here:
>>>>
>>>> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
>>>>
>>>> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that
>>>> reporting
>>>> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components.
>>>> Having
>>>
>>> I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
>>> We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see  
>>> MNG-3402.
>>>
>>>> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple
>>>> releases of
>>>> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed.
>>>> This will
>>>> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism.
>>>> Doxia
>>>> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the
>>>> functionality just
>>>> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something
>>>> new!
>>>
>>> Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
>>> - how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
>>> - what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?
>>>
>>>> What I personally think the best path would be is to help what
>>>> Vincent has
>>>> started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia,
>>>> the
>>>> releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately
>>>> double or
>>>
>>> Agree but we work when we have time :)
>>> @Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?
>>> After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.
>>>
>>>> triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and
>>>> getting the
>>>> WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all
>>>> the time
>>>> and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the
>>>> project
>>>> as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that
>>>> wildly
>>>> different but I think you would get more visibility over there and
>>>> a higher
>>>
>>> The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki  
>>> umbrella,
>>> so do you plan to do it?
>>>
>>> @Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?
>>
>> Let me explain the point of view of the xwiki community (I hope I'm
>> summarizing it well here):
>>
>> * XWiki is not a wiki. It's a platform offering wiki components to
>> develop any type of content-centric web application based on the wiki
>> paradigm.
>>
>> * We've started reorganizing ourselves to implement this vision back
>> in 2007. We've started by decoupling our monolithic code into modules
>> and components (using Plexus).
>>
>> * We're not finding that there are some important pieces that we want
>> to make top level projects, independent of the other xwiki modules/
>> components. For the moment we have identified 2 pieces:
>>   - the rendering engine
>>   - our brand new GWT-based WYSIWYG editor
>>
>> * We could propose these under new projects at the ASF for example.
>> These are the reasons preventing us from doing so right now:
>>   - we'd like to promote the XWiki project name as the place where to
>> get wiki "components". If we start splitting the rendering engine or
>> the wysiwyg editor we won't achieve this
>>   - having to implement and support several projects (the xwiki one +
>> the engine one at ASF + the wysiwyg one wherever else
>> (@code.google.org for ex)) is going to spread our committer base thin
>> achieving the opposite as what we want to achieve which is making all
>> people interested on working on wiki "components" together.
>>   - we have a very good infrastructure team and we completely host
>> all our tools. We like it this way since it's real fast and it works
>> real well and we can only complain to ourselves if something is not
>> right and we can fix it right away. Note that the infra is paid by
>> XWiki SAS (a company offering services on top of the xwiki oss  
>> project
>> - See http://tinyurl.com/7c488p for more details)
>> - basically we can work faster if the code is on the xwiki svn
>>
>> It's possible that one day we'll propose the whole project to the ASF
>> but I don't think we're ready for that yet. For the moment we like it
>> the way we are able to progress fast and we don't feel the need.
>>
>> Note that xwiki projects are currently under the LGPL but we can
>> discuss making the new rendering engine (which would be the merge
>> between doxia, xwiki and wikimodel ) under the ASL if you feel this  
>> is
>> better.
>>
>> Now why are we interested in merging them all? Actually that wasn't
>> our idea. It was Jason's. We were fine developing and progressing  
>> fast
>> on our own xwiki rendering engine. But at the same time it's true  
>> that
>> I've realized it was a pity that XWiki/WikiModel and Doxia are re-
>> developing the same things instead of collaborating and working on
>> building something together. So I see 2 win-win advantages for us  
>> all:
>> - for Doxia this can be a way to make it live on and be active again,
>> with even more features and better support
>> - for XWiki we would love to get some new committers on board to help
>> us with the rendering engine (we currently have about 3 committers
>> active on it either full time or part time). In addition the merge
>> between these 3 engines (xwiki/wikimodel/doxia) would create a new
>> rendering engine that could easily be the best rendering engine on  
>> the
>> web. For us one advantage would be to spread the xwiki name even more
>> and thus get more contributors and users of the xwiki "components"  
>> and
>> applications.
>>
>> Last, while I see it very interesting to everyone to perform this
>> merge, I can understand if some people would prefer to continue
>> working on what they do on their side without merging. That's fine  
>> and
>> I'm not going to fight for doing the merge at all cost. Especially
>> since doing the merge is going to be costly for us in term of time/
>> effort. For it to be worthwhile we must all agree to it and like the
>> idea.
>>
>> So what happens if the merge isn't done? On the xwiki side we'll
>> continue to improve our rendering engine fast (we're progressing very
>> fast right now since we have very active committers and since the
>> rendering is actively used in all the xwiki applications this will
>> continue). Even though we have a Doxia bridge we're not using it for
>> different reasons but one of them is that the Doxia parsers we've
>> tried were not good enough. I remember trying the confluence one and
>> it was very buggy. So I was just waiting for the need to use the
>> confluence parser to arise before rewriting it using wikimodel  
>> (it's a
>> one day job at max to get a very strong parser, thanks to wikimodel
>> tools).
>>
>> Merging has its share or work required on both sides but it's the  
>> best
>> option in the end IMO. Now it's for you to decide if this has enough
>> interest for Doxia.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -Vincent
>>
>> PS: If you want to see how the xwiki project is managed read
>> http://tinyurl.com/7c488p and go to http://dev.xwiki.org which  
>> contains all
>> our dev practices
>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Vincent
>>>
>>>> degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is
>>>> more
>>>> complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this
>>>> list.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Jason
>
>