Within the OpenSource EA Tool iteraplan, we think about offering Wiki support in textfields like descriptions of applications or business processes. A search about OpenSource Java Wiki Engines revealed four possible candidates:
- Radeox: with no real further development going on
- XWiki: Powerful engine with lots of formats supported. And the rendering is an extra component and some documentation for external use is provided:
- Bliki: This engine is part of the Java Wikipedia API
- WikiText: a component of Mylyn which also can be used stand alone
- WikiText FAQ: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn/FAQ#WikiText,
- Blog “Rich Editing for Tasks via Mylyn WikiText”: http://tasktop.com/blog/eclipse/rich-editing-for-tasks-via-mylyn-wikitext,
- DeveloperGuide: http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.mylyn.wikitext.help.ui/help/devguide/WikiText%20Developer%20Guide.html
So far XWiki and WikiText (Mylyn) look most promising. Has anyone already used them? Any recommendations?
For us an important feature is to have not only the possibility to export the text to HTML, but also to have it in plain text, which might get used in graphical reports or Excel exports or … I think there must be some examples out there already since it shouldn’t be that new.
KarstenVoges - Enterprise Architecture, Startup, Lean 
The opensource Wikbook project is using XWiki rendering engine to create docbook from wiki text. The framework part is simple and straightforward to understand and provide all the facilities to build a powerful wiki oriented framework on top of XWiki rendering engine.
I second Julien here, as I’ve been looking for a more up-to-date, powerful, and active wiki engine for a project. I’d like to use a wiki syntax for authoring some executable specification.
Radeox is dead and is not evolving at all.
I’ve not tried the other two you mention.
But I investigated XWiki, and it’s the choice I’ve made. It’s pretty straightforward to use, very powerful and extensible (you can create your own macros, etc), and you have a nice DOM API for accessing any part of your content which can prove to be very useful if you want to programmatically have access and/or manipulate some parts of the content, etc.
So I’d say +1 for XWiki, great choice!
Hi Guillaume,
thx for the reply and the insights. Much appreciated.
Any plans on marking text attributes in Grails as wiki-style 😉
Would be a nice plugin I guess.
Is the project you mentioned also OpenSource? Or any further references to the integration?
Besides we just integrated the latest and greatest from Spring 3 series (core, webflow and security). Great work.
Regarding Grails, we discussed the possibility to upgrade Grails’ doc system to leverage XWiki Rendering Engine instead of the aging Radeox.
There’s also an existing plugin for Grails here using XWiki:
http://www.grails.org/plugin/xwiki-rendering
And as to the project I’m mentioning, we’re looking into making an executable language specification for Groovy, and we have a Google Summer of Code student who’s starting to work on that right now, and that should be open-sourced as well, actually part of the Groovy build, and potentially made standalone for later reuse.
Let me know if I understood well. Could you integrate xwiki with Spring 3? MVC and Security modules too?
Yes, we integrated the xwiki Wiki-Engine within our normal Spring-based application. In iteraplan we use quite some Spring components, such as Core, AOP, MVC, Flow & Security. You could get our integration code from the website. Download as ZIP.
Let me know if I can help you with your decision. I’m happy to answer any questions that you might have about WikiText.
we started with trying XWiki, currently having some classloader issues. I’ll keep you posted.
Hope you solved the classloader problems you had. If not, please send us a mail on the XWiki users mailing list and we’ll be happy to help you: dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/MailingLists
Thanks
-Vincent
we finally solve it, so we are in the stage of getting the solution production ready. Most probably it will get included in the October release of iteraplan. Watch iteraplan.de for updates.