Friday, August 26, 2005

Evaluating JSPWiki It's been a while (a couple of years) since I've looked at JSPWiki. It seems to have really grown up - either that or it has a lot of bells and whistles that I had forgotten about. I've been looking at JSPWiki together with some colleagues as part of setting up a new agile project. Impressive things that I've noticed so far: Really easy installation. Just: Drop JSPWiki.jar into Tomcat's webapps directory Unpack the provided sample pages zip file into the directory where you want to store the Wiki's pages Run the installation procedure (e.g. http://myhost:8080/JSPWiki/Install.jsp and answer the small set of questions. That's it! Built-in RSS feeds on a per-page basis. The feeds are not enabled by default and it does not seem to support some of the latest standards like RSS 2.0, but it just the thing for project news pages. You can ask your team members to subscribe to the project news feed in their agregator to provide a really good means of making sure that even remote team members are kept up to date. An Excel viewer plugin. This is not built-in, is a little bit fiddly to install but once installed performs well. It renders Excel spreadsheets as HTML using XSLT. The output, although basic, is good for making those documents that are best maintained as spreadsheets (such as prioritised sets of requirements) viewable on the Wiki. Attachments. Many Wikis support attachments these days but JSPWiki's approach is straight-forward and just works. It enables those useful Excel and Powerpoint files that every project tends to accumulate to be easily accessed by everyone on the project. Includes plug-ins for simple weblog functionality. Improvements that I'd like to see: RSS 2.0 with enclosures support. With that added, JSPWiki could even be used for podcasting! Currently the Excel viewer plug-in needs Excel files to be placed on the file system and referenced via their absolute path. It would be really good if the plug-in could be integrated with the Wiki's attachment facility so that Excel files can simply be attached and then made available via the Excel viewer. tags: agile wiki 9:08:46 PM    comment []  trackback []

Shipping Code vs Playing Politics Marc's Voice: Dave's Back: "Us crazy old folks love to hang together. But we ship code. We don't sit around and talk about it. And it's the code that matters. And delivering compelling experiences to our end-users." Boy can I relate to that. Information technology projects should be about shipping working code and systems. In the UK at least, so much energy is wasted in playing petty politics rather than getting working systems out that actually do what the users want and need. I really hope that Dave's travels bring him to London soon. There's a lot of overlap between his ideas on developers engaging users and the agile approach. tag: winer 6:20:25 PM    comment []  trackback []