JSPWiki is a wonderful tool

For a long time I’ve wanted a tool to help with general documentation on projects, coding, ideas, “things I’ve learned”, tips and tricks, and on and on.  It’s nice to have something at work to do this with, because frankly, I learn a lot of little things to help me in my job that sometimes I just forget.  And is there a possibility that someone else has learned those same things? yep.  Maybe they want to write about or tweak the same things I’ve documented.

Try a Wiki for your development team.  Whether it’s Java, PHP, or something else. Give it a try. I work in a Java shop, so I looked a almost went with a PHP based solution (because I work in PHP as a hobby), but decided it would be best to go with a Java solution.  Side goals regarding this include perhaps someday contributing back to the project.

I found JSPWiki. What Java based Wiki’s have you found?

JSPWiki is fairly straightforward to setup.  I’m running it in Tomcat 6.0.18.  I don’t suggest auto deployment, since the configuration information is stored in WEB-INF/jspwiki.properties and could easily be lost in an upgrade.  So I unzipped to the webapps folder and versioned the files with Subversion.  Easy enough.

What I did:

1. Unzip WAR to the TOMCAT_HOME/webapps folder.
2. Open a web browser and request “http://localhost:8084/JSPWiki/Install.jsp” (verify your port; watch the case on Install.jsp)
3. Enter the config parameters making sure you enter at the very least the “Page storage” parameter.  Otherwise pages are stored in the web app folder
   
4. Enter the other parameters and press Configure! at the bottom of the page.
5. A page will be displayed to enter an ADMIN user.  After this, you will have to be logged in as the admin in order to see the Install page again.
6. UnZip “JSPWiki-corepages” for your language in the directory defined by “Page storage” above.  This is just a bunch of starter and help pages.
7. Start editing your Wiki.

There are some plugins available for it. http://www.jspwiki.org/wiki/JSPWikiPlugins

You can use the triple braces for code, or you can install the plugin Code2HTML, giving a little better visual for code;  There’s a special syntax to use, but it’s nice.