This is the first milestone of the XWiki Enterprise 4.1 version (Roadmap). This release brings new 3D graphs made with pure XWiki syntax, safer Groovy scripting, and better hiding of internal application related documents.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki Enterprise 4.0 version)

3D Charting

We've added 2 new types of charts, bar3D and line3D, which draw 3D charts.

For example the following code:

Will be rendered as this:

Hide Technical Documents

This effort was started in XWiki 4.0. However in 4.0 we had only implemented the technical solution to mark documents as hidden but we didn't get the time to use it. Now in 4.1 we've marked a lot of documents as Technical and we've modified a lot of UI screens to only display technical documents for users who ask for it.

Specifically there's a User Profile preference that you can set if you wish to see technical documents:

More precisely, the following was implemented:

• Mark a lot of documents as technical documents in the default XWiki Enterprise XAR
• Filter hidden documents from Lucene search results
• Filter hidden documents from database search results
• Filter hidden documents from default panels
• Filter hidden documents in REST APIs
• Filter hidden documents in LiveTable results

As a consequence, by default, a user will only about 24 documents out of 300+ that exist in the default XWiki Enterprise XAR, making it a lot nicer and simpler to apprehend.

Improvements to the Extension Manager

The speed and reliability of the Extension Repository has been improved considerably. For example the XWiki.org Extension Repository is now much faster when you access it from XWiki Enterprise and you should now be able to browse and install extensions in no time.

We polished the extension log (e.g. install log) display. In case the extension job fails (in the image below the job of computing the install plan fails) we extract the error message and display it. You can view the full stack trace by clicking on the error message.

The install and uninstall plans have been improved to display extensions like in the dependency section. This way you can follow the link of an extension to find out more about what is going to be installed or uninstalled.

The install and uninstall process is now completely asynchronous. You can see below how the progress is indicated.

Taming of Groovy scripts

Since traditionally, Groovy scripts can enter into unstoppable infinite loops, use reflection to violate security assumptions, access server resources, or even crash the virtual machine, they have been off limits to non-administrators. 

In a bid to open up new scripting options to less permitted users (especially in wiki farms where getting Programming Rights is a problem since it means having those rights on the whole farm), steps have been taken to make Groovy safer. 

Groovy scripts are now technically allowed to users having simple Edit rights but the Groovy Sandbox is currently very restrictive (said differently, you cannot do anything useful with it at the moment! ). Now that we have the mechanism in place our plan is to slowly open up allowed operations.

To enable and test this feature read the document for both the Commons Groovy Module and the Platform Groovy Module.

Compilation customizers

Customizers can be registered to alter the Groovy script as it is compiled such as filtering System.exit() calls and adding timeout checks to loops to prevent infinite looping. Learn more: http://www.jroller.com/melix/entry/upcoming_groovy_goodness_automatic_thread

Stop run-away Groovy scripts after a configurable timeout

You can now configure your wiki to stop Groovy scripts after a configurable amount of run time. For example if you wish to have a timeout of 10 seconds for your XWiki runtime, you'd configure xwiki's xwiki.properties with:

New support for "short form" HQL queries in the Query Manager

When you send a search query to the Query Manager such as where doc.creationDate > '2008-01-01' It is now assumed that you meant:

For developers

• New rendering Compatibility Test Suite to make testing easier and simplify implementation of new syntax Parsers and Renderers. You can checkout the Compatibility report for all the syntaxes that are supported out of the box by XWiki.

• New API for upgrading installed XWiki Extensions.

Bug fixes and improvements

• Fixed wrong calculation of IDs for stats values making it impossible to upgrade a wiki to version 4.0 if statistics collection is enabled.
• Faster first startup time by not running a database migration when it is not needed.
• Simplify reverse proxy setup by making all HTTP redirects use relitive URLs.
• Add support for bold, italic and monospace in the TeX Renderer
• Was impossible to delete then recreate a subwiki with the same name, fixed.
• Fixed Javascript error when scrolling over Search Suggest results in Internet Explorer 6.
• Trying to change a document's parent from the REST service resulted in an error, fixed.
• It is now possible for non-administrators to execute cross-wiki XWQL queries.

See the full list of JIRA issues fixed in this release.

For Developers

• Move ComponentManager deprecated methods to Legacy modules
• New Groovy module in xwiki-commons
• Add legacy module structure for XWiki Rendering
• Have one Maven module per XWiki Rendering syntax
• Separate Event Syntax from Rendering API by moving it to a Syntax module
• Plain syntax and Event syntax have been moved out of Rendering API nto their own modules.

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

• Tika 1.1
• JGroups 3.0.10
• Pygments 1.5
• Selenium 2.21
• Maven AspectJ Plugin 1.4
• commons-io 2.3
• Maven Shade plugin 1.6

Retired modules

The AutoTag plugin has been extracted from the oldcore into its own module, and isn't distributed by default anymore. If your code depends on this plugin, you have to download it, copy it into your installation WEB-INF/lib, and enable it in xwiki.cfg.

Test Report

You can check the manual test report to learn about what was tested and the results on various browsers.

Tested Browsers

Here's the list of browsers tested with this version (i.e. browsers that we've tested as working - Check the list of supported browsers):

Firefox

12.0.1

Tested Databases

HyperSQL

2.2.8

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

General Notes

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from all the improvements listed above.

Issues specific to XWiki Enterprise 4.1 Milestone 1

The old experimental real-time synchronization plugin for the WYSIWYG content editor has been retired. We hope that its functionality will be replaced by the real-time editing feature developed on the Wiki 3.0 project. If you want to continue using the old plugin you need to:

• take the code from xwiki-contrib/retired GitHub repo
• add the client and server side as dependencies to the WYSIWYG client and server side respectively
• modify WysiwygEditorFactory to register the factory of the sync plugin
• rebuild the editor and update the jars and client side resources on your XWiki Enterprise instance

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since version 4.0: