Vincent Massol, our CTO, had the pleasure of presenting a talk on "Next generation Wikis: Mixing Content-Oriented Applications with Wikis" at Jazoon 2009.

Here is the abstract:

The talk will present and demo characteristics of next generation wikis based on the XWiki open source project:

• Ability to develop content-oriented applications directly inside wiki pages
• Polyglot wiki: support of multiple wiki syntaxes
• Polymorphism: ability to use the wiki as a web site, an intranet or as a lightweight CMS
• Semi-structured: Mixing of structured information with free form content

Today, Web 2.0 applications are all the rage. A key feature of Web 2.0 applications is the ability to offer collaboration features to its users. Next Generation wikis offer a generic development platform that offers high level services for writing collaborative applications on top of them, such as Document editing and versioning services, multiple syntaxes services, rendering services, PDF/RTF/HTML export services, WYSIWYG editing, REST/GWT/XMLRPC service support, Storage services, Search services, multi instance services and a lot more.

The talk will demonstrate real-world realizations using next generation wikis showing what can be done and will assert that next generation wikis are one more tool in the developer's bag of tools to consider when developing collaborative and content-oriented web applications.

*You will find the presentation on Slideshare.

Jerome Velociter, Anca Luca, Eduard Moraru and Ecaterina Valica, from XWiki, participated in the eLiberatica, a conference about the benefits of open source and free technologies. Jerome made a presentation about applications wikis and productivity:

High Productivity With Applications Wikis

View more Microsoft Word documents from xwiki.

All the presentations have been published on Slideshare by the organisers and you'll find some photos of the event on Flickr.

In few words, Groovy :

• is an agile and dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine
• builds upon the strengths of Java but has additional power features inspired by languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk
• makes modern programming features available to Java developers with almost-zero learning curve
• supports Domain-Specific Languages and other compact syntax so your code becomes easy to read and maintain
• makes writing shell and build scripts easy with its powerful processing primitives, OO abilities and an Ant DSL
• increases developer productivity by reducing scaffolding code when developing web, GUI, database or console applications
• simplifies testing by supporting unit testing and mocking out-of-the-box
• seamlessly integrates with all existing Java objects and libraries
• compiles straight to Java bytecode so you can use it anywhere you can use Java

At XWiki we have been using this technology from the beginning. We use Groovy (1.6.3 as of this writing) to allow extending XWiki directly from wiki pages and to offer a scripting language for users to that they can display anything they want in wiki pages. You would like to mention too the Groovy Console application contributed by Jerome Velociter, that allows to enter Groovy code, to run it interactively and to see the console result on the page.

After a long day at JavaOne (where you could see XWiki), Groovy Tech Lead Guillaume Laforge sat down with Scott Davis (from ThirstyHead, a training and consulting company that specializes in Groovy, Grails, and easy) to chat about the new features in Groovy 1.6 and much more.

Thanks to Guillaume for mentionning XWiki!

We are at JavaOne (the place to be for Java people) in San Francisco, until Friday. Come see us at the OW2 pavilion (booth 116).

To be informed about our presence there and about the event, you can:

• Follow us on the micro-blogging service Twitter: Guillaume and Ludovic.
• Follow the event on Twitter too: http://twitter.com/JavaOneConf
• Listen to the JavaOne radio: http://java.sun.com/javaone/#blogtalk

Three months ago, Mozilla Lab's Concept Series launched their first Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. They invited design-focused students from around the world to participate and develop solutions to the question "What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web."

Different categories were proposed:

• Best in Class: Innovation - For the solution that has the newest / most original interaction model
• Best in Class: Execution - For the solution that has the most expressive prototype (polish as well as functional availability)
• Best in Class: Interaction - For the solution that provides the best human-computer-interaction model
• Best in Class: Producible - For the solution that would be the easiest to ship to users immediately

Ecaterina Valica, our User Interface Designer and Web Developer, participated in this open call with the following proposal: "Collaborative research on a virtual desk". And she won in Innovation category. CONGRATULATIONS!!! We are very very proud.

• To know more about the original idea and her arguments, go to her website.
• To test Ecaterina's prototype, it's here.
• To test all the prototypes, visit this page.

As Guillaume Lerouge said on his blog, we're getting closer to our biggest XWiki release ever...

Here is an awesome screencast of XWiki Enterprise 1.9 wih Quick Jump to any page, attach multiple files at once, new rich text editor, import office files...:

You can check out the release notes at http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/ReleaseNotesXWikiEnterprise19M2 (there's more to come !!)

XWiki Concerto is a research project bringing together XWiki, INRIA (ECOO and ATLAS teams), ENST, Mandriva and EISTI.

The project's main goal is to develop a mobile P2P architecture for the XWiki engine, offline work and replication of content across a large number of peers. XWiki will be able to support mobile collaborative activities using an efficient and secure solution for content replication and synchronization.

• Want to see how it works? Take a look at: http://tinyurl.com/c3whvw
• Want to test XWiki Concerto? Check it out at: http://concerto.xwiki.org

Curriki, one of XWiki's main customers, is an independent nonprofit organization that supports the development and free distribution of open source educational materials, an online environment created to improve education worldwide. Watch Chris Walsh' interview for CUE Live with Joshua Marks, the CTO of Curriki, and learn more about the project:

It's now possible to leave a comment on XWiki blog. Great news, isn't it?

The third party comment service for blogging platforms Intense Debate, bought by Wordpress few months ago, has been installed.

Rich and interactive, it offers several advantages and functions, both for the administrator of the Intense Debate account, and for the visitors of the blog. For instance:

• Comment Threading,
• Moderation/Blacklisting,
• Reputation Points & Comment Voting,
• You don't have to create an account at Intense Debate to comment,
• OpenID 2.0 support,
• ...

To know more about the integration of Intense Debate in XWiki, please read this article by Vincent Massol.

Red Hat has published the results of a project led with Georgia Institute of Technology. The project's objective was to research the state of open source around the world. Guess what? France is ranked #1 overall out of 75 countries !!

This is the map showing the relative level of open source activity in 75 countries. France is ranked #1 overall.

All the research's results are presented as an interactive Open Source Activity Map that lets you see how the seventy five countries examined for the project are ranked globally.

The final score of each country is made calculated out of a number of factors including public policy and industry & government practices.

Now that's good news for France :-)