8 Sept 2005

Daisy vs JSPWiki - The winner is...

In my previous post jspwiki against daisy, I decided I would take a look at daisy because of jspwiki's creator opinion of the product.

First despite the shiny title of this post: there is no winner, these are different products with totally different approaches.
Actually I don't really understand why Janne is so depressed about daisy?

JSPWiki is a really simple / easy to use wiki. Amongst other wiki(s) I tried, it's best one.
I tried Friki2.1 (lack basic features, left menu for example, bad search engine...), Ward's original wiki (not easy to read, lack features), mediawiki (too complex, allow to much customization of the presentation - table color etc... - mixed with data)
I know there are many others one but since I've always been happy with jspwiki and I know java/tomcat ... I didn't bother looking for an other one.
The cool thing about jspwiki is that it's simple and you get a basic wiki with almost no installation (tomcat + copy/past jspwiki.jar and you're done!)
Every time I needed an other feature, I always found the right plugin for jspwiki (blog in a jspwiki, index of pages etc...)

Now daisy is more complex and it has many other features.
Daisy is a full CMS system (yet an other one I would say), the installation is more complex but if you follow the step by step installation guide everything works fine.
After installing you will have at least 4 services running (MySQL, openjms, daisy wiki a webapp and daisy core).
Daisy can deal with subprojects, branches, documents revisions, languages, users, roles.
It has a WISIWYG editor, tons of options, a back office...
Just take a look at the full features list.

Keep in mind I didn't look for any particular feature to use, I just took a look at it.

Daisy is not what I'm looking for. I just want the simplest way to edit documents/notes and share them with other people on my project.
Daisy need to be installed, learned and administered on top of adding real documents.
People (including myself) won't update (lazyness/forget) documents if it's too complicate, if someone needs to validate documents or add privileges to the users before publishing.
Maybe for a corporate site where you'd better not print false information but for a project documentation, I think it's overkill.

Amongst the few things I would complain about daisy, is the necessity to know a document internal id to create a link to it. I think people will just add the http link instead of creating the internal uri using the document Id. (the path of least resistance)

Now you can see for yourself, you can have a live example with cocoondev.

update: an interesting opinion about jspwiki vs daisy.

1 comment:

Janne said...

Thanks :-)

/Janne