roller vs. jspwiki

[Jeff Blattman <Je...@Sun.COM>]

given that jspwiki has a blog function, would there ever be a reason to 
deploy both roller and jspwiki? beyond the fact that roller is, i would 
say, <insert subjective phrasing here> with it's handling of weblogs vs. 
jspwiki, is there a technical reason?

one argument would be to deploy both and let the user choose. however, 
we have a situation where jspwiki is already entrenched in our 
environment ... integrated with our SSO and search solutions. all things 
being equal, it's a hard sell to do that integration work (or live 
without it) for roller as well.

thoughts?

Re: roller vs. jspwiki

[Janne Jalkanen <ja...@gmail.com>]

> It's my impression that JSPWiki's blog features are somewhat limited.


Your impression is quite correct.

Does it support group blogging with admin, author and limited roles?


Yes, kind of.  But unfortunately, this would be a very manual task to
manage.

Can bloggers control their own templates at runtime?


Yes, but it's not exactly designed to do it, so this would be pretty clunky.

Does it scale to
> thousands of blogs?


I have no idea.  I know it scales to thousands of pages, but the way that
the weblog plugin is implemented means that it probably does not scale to
thousands of blogs with thousands of *entries*.  This is because I have
implemented the weblog functionality mostly for my personal use at the
moment, and have not paid attention to massive scaling issues.  I have a
hunch that JSPWiki will drop the gloves and go home at somewhere around
100,000 pages...  Blogs create a lot of pages real fast.

JSPWiki. Roller can be integrated with an external JSPWiki: you can
> use JSPWiki syntax to compose your Roller blog entries and any wiki-
> words that you use will point into your wiki.


Yup, this is pretty cool, methinks ;-)


> Janne: do you have an opinion on this topic? You run your personal
> blog on JSPWiki. Am I underestimating the blog features of JSPWiki?


I have confidence in JSPWiki as a wiki.  But I have never really thought of
it as a blog platform.  I see no fundamental reason why the weblog
functionality could not be rewritten to be a fully scalable blog platform,
but as it currently stands, I wouldn't deploy it in a big enterprise scale.
But it might work for SMEs.  Probably.  It's certainly okay as a personal
blog platform, even if it does not have all the whizz-bangs of Wordpress or
Roller.  If only I had someone I could send bug reports to... ;-)

The big issue I see is not technical.  Wikis and blogs are fundamentally,
technically very similar.  The real problem is that a blog platform needs to
be a lot friendlier than what JSPWiki is right now.  This means a lot of UI
work, custom JSPs (or plugins) to facilitate nothing but blogging purposes,
rethinking URL schemes, bringing trackbacks and that sort of stuff.  You
know, you've written a blog engine ;-)

If anyone wants to start and help me out with this task, that would be
great! (said he, with a coffee mug in his hand.)  It's not really a priority
for me personally right now.

/Janne

Re: roller vs. jspwiki

[Dave Johnson <da...@rollerweblogger.org>]

On Mar 22, 2006, at 5:06 PM, Jeff Blattman wrote:
> given that jspwiki has a blog function, would there ever be a  
> reason to deploy both roller and jspwiki? beyond the fact that  
> roller is, i would say, <insert subjective phrasing here> with it's  
> handling of weblogs vs. jspwiki, is there a technical reason?

It's my impression that JSPWiki's blog features are somewhat limited.  
Does it support group blogging with admin, author and limited roles?  
Can bloggers control their own templates at runtime? Does it scale to  
thousands of blogs? I think the answer to those questions is no.

So my answer is yes, if you want both a full multi-user blog system  
and a wiki, then yes it would make sense to deploy both Roller and  
JSPWiki. Roller can be integrated with an external JSPWiki: you can  
use JSPWiki syntax to compose your Roller blog entries and any wiki- 
words that you use will point into your wiki.

Janne: do you have an opinion on this topic? You run your personal  
blog on JSPWiki. Am I underestimating the blog features of JSPWiki?

- Dave