January is here and this means we've just finished the XWiki 12.x cycle. It's time to look back at what we achieved last year, in 2020. Here are some links to visual reports of what was done in 12.x:

• High importance changes
• Medium importance changes
• Low importance changes
• All changes having screenshots
• All user-related changes ...

December is here and this means we're finishing the XWiki 11.x cycle. It's time to look back at what we achieved this year, in 2019. Here are some links to visual reports of what was done in 11.x:

• High importance changes
• Medium importance changes
• Low importance changes
• All changes having screenshots
• All user-related changes ...

The XWiki development team is very happy to announce the call for participation of the devroom "Collaborative information and content management application devroom", held during the 2020 edition of FOSDEM, on the morning of Saturday February 1st. ...

Hello there! My name is Divyansh Jain. I am a student at Mahatma Jyoti Rao Phoole University. I have been selected as an Android developer for the XWiki organization and I've finished working on their XWiki Android Authenticator application in GSOC19. ...

Mentors:

I want to thank my mentors Shubham Jain, Neha Gupta and XWiki organisation for giving me such an opportunity and helping me out throughout my journey of GSOC. I also want to also thank Vincent Massol for helping me out in one of my dependent project.

A little bit about me

My name is Ashish Sharma, I am 23 and I am a final year student from Bharati Vidyapeeth's College of Engineering, India. I have participated in GSoC'19 program as a student in XWiki and worked on "Helm chart for XWiki".

What did I expect from GSoC 2019

This was my first Google Summer of Code and the concept to contribute for 3 months in an open-source organisation was exciting for me. I got an opportunity to work remotely on a project. I was curious to explore how an open-source organisation work. Anyway, I have expected new experience in remote internship, open source project contributing, Google Summer of Code participating and international only remote communication.

In this post I want to describe what I have finished and what is not completed yet and why.

Description

This project focoused on creating a helm chart that would deploy xwiki on Kubernetes by using helm templating. The deployment should be configurable to be scalacble, highly available and roboust.

You can find the project code at

https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/xwiki-helm and

The issue tracker can be found

https://jira.xwiki.org/projects/HELM/issues

How to use the result of my work

Read about prerequite

Milestones

Milestones 1:

Creating a basic helm chart

• Understanding xwiki's docker structure.
• Understanding and taking the decision for using the correct resource to host xwiki.
• So I started up using the StatefulSet, clusterIP service and ingress.
• Added values files which help in making the chart dynamically configurable.
• Then we neded to support multiple databases and was in a need of a solution that don't require to deploy database externally, so a good standard for adding dependency for other services like database were needed.
• So we decided to add database as a helm dependency, that helped us to templatise the databases in our application which makes deploying databases easier, we don't need to deploy the chart seprately.
• So we added support for database mysql and postgress through dependency and also given option for user to deploy it's own external database.

Milestestone 2:

Adding support for ISTIO and other features

• Till now we have a chart that would deploy our standalone application, now we need
• Added support for ISTIO
• Till now the helm were taking values from values file, we needed a way to manage our envoirnment variable that we pass to our container, and we also need to secure the sensetive variables like db password. For that I used Kubernetes resources configMaops and Secrets. These help us save and manage our variable securely and properly.
• XWiki-helm also needed an optional feature to havdle Pod disruption, if the users have a heavy dependency on xwiki. This features make the xwiki chart user configure the minimum number of pods that should be running while pods are been destroyed due to any reason.
• A need for shared file storage were needed, secially when serviec provider like GKE does not provide ReadWriteMany option, so to run xwiki on cluster we need different database solution like Rook, I had researched about it and also written a blog on how to set up Rook on GKE for shared file system

Milestone 3:

Adding support for clustering,HA and Unit testing

• While moving towards HA and clustering we got to know that XWiki need shared file storage for clustering which was not available in StatefulSet, so we made a desicion to migrate to Deployment.
• We needed to add test-cases so I added unit-testing.
• Clustering was required to take xwiki on HA. For that we need docker to enable option to configure clustering, so first I made changes in docker project and provided option to configure JGroups.
• Then I needed to provide the option in helm. For that I had to face another challenge to how to pass configuration files needed by JGroup from my helm chart to the container. For that I took the file in ConfigMaps and mounted the file to the xwiki pods. Also provided option to enable and disable JGroups.
• While enabling clustering we need to know which pods are avialable to accept request and which are dead so that we can route traffic accordingly, for that I needed to configure liveliness and readiness probes, so that kubernetes always get updated with the state of the container and if the container crashes it could restart the pod.
• XWiki uses solr and the docker it embededs solr internally, but as suggested by XWiki for performance improvement solr should be externalised, so I tried to add it as a dependency but failed due to an immature helm chart of solr, and how the xwiki configures solr, it was not possible with the current solr chart state. So for now I have exposed the basic parameter and the user has to manually setup solr and pass the url of the solr.

Hello there! My name is Divyansh Jain. I am a student of Mahatma Jyoti Rao Phoole University. I have been selected as the Android developer for the XWiki organization and I am working on their XWiki Android Authenticator application in GSOC19.

XWiki android Authenticator aims to integrate a wiki instance in Android accounts, mainly including the synchronization of contacts and the XWiki authenticator. By synchronizing contacts of your company on your phone, it becomes easier to communicate and collaborate with each other.

Ever since the start of my work on the XWiki Android Authenticator app, I have been constantly learning new things. In the first week, I migrated most of the XWiki Android Application code from Java to Kotlin. And on this page, I would like to share my understanding of Kotlin that I have gained so far.
 

Getting started with Kotlin

Kotlin is officially supported by Google for mobile development on Android. It was released in Android Studio 3.0 on October 2017. At first, I was a bit afraid to switch to Kotlin since I feared that the code might crash and not run properly, but as I read the documentation, I started understanding the nuances of the language which made the switch from Java to Kotlin an easier process. I started realizing the advantages of Kotlin over Java. Some of them being:

Java Interoperability

I started with migrating the whole XWiki Android Authenticator app code from Java to Kotlin. I was replacing one Java file at a time, and while migrating I saw that Kotlin worked with Java smoothly. Though it required some direct imports, there were no errors in running the app on the device.

Changed variable declaration

In Java, we declare string for instance, String str = "Hello";.

In Kotlin, we declare string for instance, val str = "Hello" or val str: String = "Hello". Here val declares a read-only property or local variable whereas var declares a mutable property or local variable.

The final keyword is default in class

In Kotlin final is a default. E.g.

In the above example, class displayToast can’t inherit Button class because it is final. Moreover, it can’t override click(), because it is final in Button.

In order to inherit and override, we put “open” keyword that allows inheritance and overriding.

Fun keyword for defining functions

Now in Kotlin, there is a new way to define functions. E.g.

It is same as the Java parameterized method or empty method.

The when expression

The "switch-case" is replaced with the much more readable and flexible "when" expression: E.g.

It works without the argument too.

Static keywords

For declaring static methods & variables, you can put them above the class name, then you can use them by importing directly in other classes.

Null Safety

One of the biggest flaws in Java is the way it handles “null,” leading to the dreaded NulPointerException (NPE). Kotlin resolves this by distinguishing between non-null types and nullable types. Types are non-null by default, and can be made nullable by adding a safe call ‘?’. E.g.

Conclusion

So after seeing, reading and migrating the code from Java to Kotlin, in my honest opinion, I do not see any reason to not choose Kotlin over Java. For instance, we need to write less code as compared to Java, we don't have to face the dreaded ‘NPE’ error anymore, interoperability with existing Java files, smart casts while declaring variables and many more. We've given the fair amount of our time to Java, but it's time to let it go and welcome our new friend Kotlin.

Happy Reading.

10.x cycle is defined by having an improved usability for on-boarding new users and administrators: from protection against refactoring operations, to editing inline macro content, to more auto-suggests, to a faster user interface. ...

The XWiki development team is very happy to announce the call for participation of the devroom "Collaborative information and content management application devroom", held during the 2019 edition of FOSDEM, on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd February.

Please see below for the full call for participation.

Call for Participation

This is the call for participation in the FOSDEM 2019 devroom on Collaborative information and content management applications, to be held on Saturday 2nd February 2019 in Brussels, Belgium. We are looking for contributions under the form of conferences, talks or discussions covering the following main topics:

• New projects presentation
• Self-hosted platforms
• Secure collaboration
• Collaborative applications
• Connectors & Integrations
• Knowledge management techniques
• Protocols for collaboration
• …

If you have any idea of a talk fitting into the subject of the devroom, please don't hesitate to let us know about it!
We hope to provide an opportunity for everyone to meet and exchange about collaborative issues encountered while using Open Source solutions ; present the some tools used for content management and discuss about global solutions for incentivizing collaboration.

Submission process

Please submit your proposals at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM19 before December 10th 2018.

If you already have a Pentabarf account (for example as a result of having submitted a proposal in the past), make sure you use it to log in and submit your proposal. Do not create a new account if you already have one. Please provide a bit of information about yourself under Person -> Description -> Abstract. When you submit your proposal (creating an "Event" in Pentabarf), make sure you choose the "Collaborative information and content management applications devroom" in the track drop-down menu. Otherwise your proposal might go unnoticed. Fill in at least a title and abstract for the proposed talk and a suggested duration. Bear in mind that a lot of the value in these meetings comes from the discussions, so please be reasonable regarding the duration of the talk.

Important dates

December 10th 2018: deadline for submission of proposals
December 16th 2018 or before: announcement of final schedule
February 2nd 2019, in the afternoon: devroom day

Recordings

The FOSDEM organizers hope to be able to live-stream and record all the talks. The recordings will be published under the same license as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). Only presentations will be recorded, not informal discussions and whatever happens during breaks between presentations. By agreeing to present at FOSDEM, you automatically give permission to be recorded. The organizers will agree to make exceptions but only for exceptional and well-reasoned cases.

Other information

This developer room is backed up by the following projects : 

• Cryptpad
• Nextcloud
• OW2
• Tiki
• XWiki

To get a bit more information about the devroom itself, including the initial proposal of the devroom itself, please see this page.

If you have any question about this devroom, please don't hesitate to get in touch by sending us an email to collab-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

Thanks,
The XWiki development team

Between the 12th and the 20th of October, Ludovic Dubost, Anca Luca and Clément Aubin will be in San Francisco. They're looking forward to meeting contributors and friends from the area, so let them know if you want to grab a coffee and exchange ideas.

What's more is that you can join themat the hackathon hosted by Noisebridge, on Saturday, 20 October. The event will start with a presentation about CryptPad, the end-to-end encrypted realtime collaboration tool, followed by the hackathon on CryptPad and XWiki, the open source software, where you can bring your contribution to the code.

The host will be Steve Phillips, creator of CrypTag & Cypherpunks Write Code and lead developer of LeapChat. Noisebridge is a hackerspace for technical-creative projects, doocratically run by its members. They are a non-profit educational institution intended for public benefit. Located in the heart of San Francisco, their motto is: We teach, we learn, we share. 

For more details about the event read a blog article posted on the XWiki SAS blog.

This is the eleventh year XWiki has participated in the Google Summer of Code program. XWiki had 12 mentors involved at various levels and 3 successful projects implemented. ...