Embedding a Wiki

On one of the projects I'm currently involved with, we are building a web based Java application with a fairly complex problem domain. In addition to general user documentation, the customer also want the ability maintain their own documentation about the domain, and link to documents they already have in their document archives. To stay within budget, we could not spend much time implementing the feature.

It immediately struck me that embedding a Java based wiki would solve the problem well. Wikis are tailored for this particular need, and I knew that there are several existing free Java based wikis available. The required features of the wiki we needed was that it supported attachments, stored data on the file system and was easy to set up. As I have used XWiki in the past, I reviewed that implementation first. Although XWiki is highly configurable and flexible, it is too complex for the simple requirements we have. I then looked at JspWiki. JspWiki is not as feature rich as XWiki, and is simpler to set up, but I had trouble getting file attachments work out of the box, and the security set up was just too much.

I was about to Google for another wiki implementation when I was made aware of Wiki Matrix. Wiki Matrix is a web site that lets you compare wikis and help you find a wiki based on your requirements. Using the wizard, I found that VQWiki suited our needs best. Extremely easy to set up. I was up and running in a seconds. It is also feature rich; printer friendly versions of pages, free text search, history ... I can warm heartedly recommend VQWiki if you need to embed an easy to set up, feature rich wiki.

Also, Wiki Matrix is really useful!