• Title: XWiki Widget and Firefox extension
• Objective: The objective of this project is to make relevant information from a wiki accessible in a widget.
• Student: Alexandru Cismaru
• Contact: alex.cismaru@gmail.com

 Project Description:

The world has seen an explosion in the use of widgets over the past year or so, and it's time for XWiki to have it's own web and desktop widgets.

User Experience The most important thing in this project is, in my opinion, the user experience. If the users don't experience quality throughout the widget, they may conclude there is a lack of quality everywhere. This means we need to pay attention to the quality of icons, images, text, background, and interaction. Each of these elements is equally important (maybe only the data is more important).

Fresh Data. The widget should display only information that changes often, information that is static for more than a day makes a widget dull. A user looks to a widget to see interesting things that are active.

Choosing the information relevant to individual users. I think a tabbed interface is the best choice for the user interface, with three tabs: General, Watchlist and Search. The General tab will display general information of a wiki: the most recent modifications, the spaces and the tags. Widgets are all about user choice and preference. That's why I propose to have a tab with the information from the Watchlist and offering the possibility to add his own rss feeds. I also think a search tab that will display a list of results is useful.

Interface design. We need to keep the widget simple and aesthetically pleasing, to show only relevant information. I want to use icons, images, and signs as much as possible; they give visual clues of the functionality. The design of the widget should not be too obtrusive. The use of buttons and user controls should be avoided at all costs (that's why I preferred using links for refresh and logout actions instead of buttons) .

Design Patterns. Developing a widget is like developing any other  software product, so we must have some design patterns to follow in order to make development easier. My approach is to concentrate on: maintainability, customizability and extensibility. By making a good separation of modules, and writing reusable code helps to maintain the widget and makes it easier to add new features. Because we want to release a XWiki widget on as many platforms as possible, I think it's important to make the widget easy to be customized for a specific platform. Another desired trait of the widget is extensibility, this way the widget can be used to extend existing functionalities.

The general Objectives are given here XEclipse, where its linked further for more details into the specific features.

Currently, I'm looking into the existing source code of XEclipse. I also had a good look at the xmlrpc implementation.

Expect to complete this project within two months from start of 'coding begin' date: 23rd May.

• Doing some research about the OpenOffice SDK API
• Discussing with the community about the software archtecture
• Developing a GUI for XOO extension
• Implementing a wizard for connecting to a XWiki server and a xwiki navigational panel
• Implementing the core classes that will be used in the future development
• Implementing  the functionalities: edit existing XWiki pages and add new XWiki pages from OpenOffice
• Implementing the functionalities: download and upload attachments
• Implementing : editing attachments supported by Open Office
• Refining the GUI and adding new small functionalities
• Improving the project using the feedback from the users

Contact

Introduction to Project

Project Description :
The idea is to integrate major IM tools like Jabber, Google Talk, Skype and allow XWiki users to chat with its members. In addition, it allows XWiki users to have multi user chatting with existing XWiki groups, users and also enables recording chat history when necessary. The XWiki users will have an easy to use but elegant user interface, which allows them to chat with XWiki users and also with other IM contacts (non XWiki) in their registered Jabber account. They will be having a great chat interface inside XWiki which is nicely integrated and balanced with existing features. In case, where user does not add their Jabber account details XWiki automatically creates a Jabber account for them. We internally create Jabber accounts for them with a Jabber server installed locally. At the end of this project, we will be using XWiki to chat while taking advantage of its all other advanced features. And more importantly XWiki users will be using their Jabber, Google Talk or Skype ids to chat if they prefer. (Great !)

Setting up the space

In order to setup a space on this wiki, I did the following:

• Registered (actually I already had a global account, but that's not the case with you)
• From the list of spaces in the Dashboard, on the main page on http://gsoc.myxwiki.org/ , click on "Create a new space", and enter the name of your project.
• Enter the short project description as the content of the page, plus #includeTopic("Blog") to have the blog content at the end of the page.
• Go to http://gsoc.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Blog/ and choose "Create another blog".
• Use the name of the space you just created and "blog inside an existing space" as the type.
• Write the first post, introducing yourself and the project.

Project description

The installation is the first contact between XWiki and a potential user. If this is not a pleasant experience, then the chances of becoming a favorite tool drop drastically. Although we have an easy to use installer that sets up a default XWiki in a few seconds, this default configuration is only suited for small wikis or testing. Beyond that, additional steps must be taken in order to have a production ready wiki, and each such step is prone to mistakes. The process gets even more complicated when trying to upgrade, since configuration files must be merged, libraries must be correctly updated, the default content of the wiki must be updated without overriding users' changes, etc.

The objective of this project is to make XWiki installation a pleasant experience, with as few as possible possible mistakes, while allowing a great deal of customization.

Planned improvements include:

• For the installer:
  • allowing the installer to deploy XWiki on other existing containers (Tomcat for example)
  • allowing the installer to detect an existing XWiki instance and correctly update it (remove updated or deleted libraries, but keep the user's jar, merge settings)
  • allowing the installer to work in graphicless environments (I think a new installer is needed for this, maybe a shell script would be enough)
  • installer infrastructure enhancements: improve the maven projects for the installer and standalone distributions to reuse as much as possible other artifacts, make the build work on Windows...
• For the first run wizard:
  • generating encryption keys
  • selecting and enabling the RDBMS
  • configuring the database (jdbc URL, username and password,
  • importing a default wiki (new installs)
  • updating the default wiki pages (upgrades)
  • idea: once we have a unified product, decide what type of instance this is: Simple XE, XEM, XWS
• Misc:
  • don't run migrations on a new install
  • stabilize the GF+Derby distribution