Wiki Software for Java and Tomcat: The search continues

November 3, 2008 at 2:16 pm (Software Development)

I eventually want to create a Blog/Wiki hybrid residing at http://www.benhutchison.com A JAMWiki (see below) site is running at the URL now, but it is temporary.

This need drove me to consider Java-based Wiki software that would run on Tomcat.

I installed, configured and tested 3 packages:

Of the three, JAMWiki seems to be the best, but sadly, still not adequate for my needs. On the plus side, it was easy to install and use for everyday Wiki stuff, and is MediaWiki compatible. Its technology stack is based on Spring 2.5 and JSP, and the code is code is neat and java-doc’ed. The 0.6.7 version tag understates its maturity.

However, when I dug deeper I found that internally, it uses a very old-fashioned DB-centric (anemic) domain model. A fair bit of the business logic is encoded into SQL queries. Plenty of code duplication and verbosity. No ORM. Poorly abstracted – lots of individual servlets take care of rendering particular pages, making the system hard to re-compose or re-configure. Ultimately, dissappointing.

I have used it for a while for http://www.benhutchison.com , but am going to move on once I find/build something better /more flexible.

XWiki has a sizeable community but I found it was too big, heavy and complex for my taste – the 45Mb War consumed masses of memory but was seemed short on useful, useable features.

JSPWiki has amateurish UI & docs (and internal code, I suspect)  – I would advise steering clear of it.

So sadly, I dont know of any Java -based Wiki engine I would recommend right now, if you want a degree of customization.

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