XWiki Platform Development Framework

XWiki platform services

The XWiki platform services are listed below in alphabetical order.

Access control

This service controls the permission for a given user (including an unauthenticated user) to perform a given action on a given XWiki Platform resource. Supported actions by default are in particular the following: admin, delete, edit, program, register, script, view.

References:

• Security Module
• Access Rights

Authentication

XWiki platform supports several authentication mechanism including authentication based on: forms, the basicauth protocol, social login protocols, LDAP, ActiveDirectory, Kerberos.

References:

• Reference page: Authentication
• XWiki Trusted authentication framework
• Javadoc

Cache

References:

• Cache Module

Component service

XWiki platform hinges on a set of components. XWiki platform defines some simple Component interfaces that can then be bound on any existing Component Manager such as Guice, OSGi, CDI (JSR299). In the future, XWiki platform will probably adopt a standard solution in JavaSE once it's available and mature enough. The XWiki component service exposes several features including the ability to declare Component interfaces, implementations and dependencies via Java annotations, the ability to have Singleton Components and Per-lookup Components, to define a Hint to separate different Components implementations implementing the same Component interface and several other key component aspects described on the XWiki Component Module documentation page.

References:

• XWiki platform component management module
• XWiki architecture
• Javadoc

Configuration

This service allows each module to create a dedicated configuration via an interface named <optional prefix><module name>Configuration (e.g. RenderingConfiguration, IconTransformationConfiguration, etc). Each module creates an implementation of that interface, named Default<optional prefix><module name>Configuration (e.g. DefaultRenderingConfiguration). The interface implementation uses one of the ConfigurationSource components provided by this Configuration module. These ConfigurationSource implementations are bound to sources where to get configuration data from: properties file, xwiki documents, etc.

References:

• XWiki Configuration Module
• XWiki ConfigurableClass
• Javadoc

Document service

XWiki platform provides a rich document model consisting of DOM static blocks, scripted blocks and macros.  This allows for document inclusion (transclusion) and dynamic documents.

On top of this document model, XWiki platforms comes with an annotation service and a collaborative real-time service editing.

References:

• Javadoc
   - packages 'com.xpn.xwiki.doc.*'
• See also:
  • Rendering service
  • Annotation service
  • Real-time editing service.

Document annotation service

This service allows to add collaboratively annotations to XWiki document object nodes (XDOM).

References:

• Annotation service
• Javadoc

Document real-time collaborative editing service

Real-time editing.

References:

• Real-time WYSIWYG editing service

Document translation management

Event bus

XWiki platform supports observation events and it's possible to do some action when a change occurs in the platform. The platform comes with a set of events and event listeners, and new events and event listeners can be defined. Event listeners can be created either in Groovy, Java, or a combination of content and scripts. 

References:

• XWiki Observation Module
  • Local Observation Module
  • Remote Observation Module
• XWiki Event Stream Module
• Tutorial on how to write and XWiki event listener
• Javadoc
• See also: Scripting service

Extensions

• Depdendency management
• Upgrade

References:

Forms

Beside the XWiki document model described above, XWiki platform provides a built-in mechanism for dealing with structured data and for presenting this data in view or edit forms via templates.

References:

• XWiki Forms and Templates
• Tutorial

Import

• Filter stream
• Office importer

See also:

• Export

References:

• XWiki BatchImport extension
• XWiki Office importer
• XWiki Filter Stream

Jobs

The Job service makes it easy to allow two ways communication with a task executed in a background thread. An XWiki platform minimal job provides: progress information, live log, a Java bean based question/answer system, and can be extended as long as the client of the API know the extended interface.

References:

• XWiki Job Module
• XWiki Job Macro
• Javadoc

Export

FilterStream module

See also:

• Import service

References:

Localization

Localization here refers to translation. This Component allows applications and components (or any Java code in general) to be translated into different languages.

References:

• Localization module
• Tutorial

Logging

References:

• XWiki platform Logging Module

Mail service

The XWiki Platorm mail service allows to send multipart mails, to embed images in HTML emails, to use mail templates, to send mails to list of users, a list of groups and a list of individual addresses (with ability to exclude users, groups and emails), ensuring that recipients don't get duplicate mails. The service supports asynchronous mail sending.

References:

• Mail Sender API
• Mail Sender Storage
• Mail Application

Notification

References:

• Notification module

Rendering

References:

REST service

References:

Query / search service

• Relational
• Full-text

References:

Scheduler

Scripting

References:

Storage

• Core data model
• Versioning

References:

• XWiki data model
• XWiki database schema

User and group service

References:

User interface service

• Skin
• Theme
• Keyboard shortcuts
• User interface extension points

References:

• XWiki features
• LESS Module

Metrics

• SLOC of xwiki-commons and xwiki-platform, + number of classes

Links

• FOSDEM 2019 presentation - Build applications incrementally on top of XWiki rather than coding them from scratch

Comparison with other frameworks

• XWiki Platform versus Django
• XWIki Platform versus ExpressJS
• XWiki Platform versus Jahia
• XWiki Platform versus Jalios
• XWiki Platform versus Jupyter
• XWiki Platform versus Sinatra

Various notes

• Stars and reviews
  • Django has nearly 50k GitHub stars
  • ExpressJS has nearly 50k GitHub stars
• Possibly not easy for newcomers to differentiate between xwiki-platform as a framework and xwiki as a product