Notes on Confluence and SocialText wiki platforms with focus on integration to e.laborate platform.

Please note that this is a living document and will be updated as the evaluation continues.

Soft requirements:

1. Open Source
2. SSL support
3. Web services integration. Preferably via REST.
4. SSO solution. Preferably SAML 2.0 or some variant of the ServiceProvider/IdentityProvider model (non-OpenID, if possible)
5. Extensibility: Plug-In model or REST/Mash-Up model (see #1)
6. Dedicated install or 'open' hosted model
7. LAMP stack or some acceptable variant
8. Amazon S3 compatible (or conditional 'roll-your-own' back-end connector integration)
9. Cheap, rock-solid, reliable applicaton with unbelievable customer support.
10. Typical scalability paths (Commonly used and easily clustered app servers and databases. Apache, Tomcat, Mongrel, Nginx, MySQL, etc.)

Confluence

Confluence is a Java based wiki app.

Features of note:

• Hosted, appliance, or user-install
• Versioning (Wiki entry, attachments) and Diff
• Post by email
•  HTML/XML/PDF export
• Blogging
• WebDAV enabled
• Full text search, including attachment content (pdf, doc, email, etc)
• RSS-able
• E-mail archival (searchable). CC to confluence and the email and replies are archived
• Content is organizable by hierarchy
• Tags
• 'Easy' Restructure / Reformat document organisation
• LDAP integration, SSL support
• MySQL support (along w/ Oracle, MSFT Sql Server, etc)
• Automated Backups built into confluence software itself. Does not need to be hosted to have auto-backup
• Security at workspace and page level
• SOAP / XML-RPC interfaces (need to do some more research on this)
• JIRA integration (if we ever decide on JIRA as a bug tracker)
• Brandable / Theme-able
• Plugin system looks pretty nice. Lots of 3rd party and Atlassian plugins:
  • http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/
  • of note:
    
    • SQL plugin to query external data source
    • 'Send to Wiki' from office
    • Chat
• SSO Integration? Start here

Social Text

Social Text is a perl-based wiki app bound to apache for mod_perl/mod_rewrite 

features of note:

• Hosted or appliance or user (developer) install (OS).
  
  • The OS (open source) version is not as fully featured as the hosted/appliance version. Also, MySQL is not supported (Postgres)
• Versioning and Diff
• Post by email
• HTML/Text/PDF export
• Blogging
• RSS-able
• Doesn't appear to be WebDAV enabled
• Tags
• Restructure / Reformat document organization does not look as fully-featured as Confluence
• Searchable, including attachment content
• LDAP/Active Directory integration
• There's a REST API, inluding examples in Ruby:
  
  • http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?very_simple_rest_in_ruby_part_1
  • http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?invitation_to_socialtext_rest_api_beta
• backups available with hosted app
• Security is actually implemented at a 'workspace' (not page) level. Kind of appears to be implemented as a 'catch-all' set up. See here.
• Brandable / Theme-able
• SSO Integration? Start here
  • Notable sentence from the link above: "In addition, Socialtext also integrates with an enterprise's existing single sign-on model. By using cookies, this allows users to authenticate once, for example to the corporate intranet or extranet portal, and then have access to a variety of services within the portal, including wikis. This simplifies the end-user experience and removes the complexity of users having to authenticate multiple times." also, "Socialtext provides a pluggable solution for directory services and single sign-on integration"
  • I'm having trouble finding this pluggable solution on their site/docs

Social Text REST API

Social Text does expose a REST API (which is our preferred web-service implementation). Notes follow (start here if you want to see the REST API overview, and here to see the REST documentation/resource list):

URI overview

REST options: 

• Pages (adding, updating, getting, listing)
• Workspaces (listing)
• Tags (adding, updating, getting, listing)
• Users (listing)
• Search (basic search query support)

Some Ruby REST examples:

• http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?very_simple_rest_in_ruby_part_1
• http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?very_simple_rest_in_ruby_part_2_put_to_create_new_page
• http://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?very_simple_rest_in_ruby_part_3_post_to_create_a_new_workspac

While the REST implementation is in Beta, it appears pretty full fledged, and the implementation appears to be a strict REST implementation and not a hybrid XML-RPC/REST. Expected HTTP status codes are used, basic auth is required (easy for Net::HTTP). One difference in their implementation versus a ruby implementation is they use the Content-Type header to specify the format of any request body details returned. Json appears to be supported as well.