One of our primary goals at JBoss Labs is to create visibility for the community activities occurring every day in the trenches of open source projects. As an early adopter of JBoss, I remember when you could go to ejboss.org and see the list of core developers, and it had a real edgy feel to it. It even had the slogan: "Coding the Future." I don't know if anyone at the time realized what that would lead to. Eventually, we began to see pictures of those developers on the site, and well, that gave the community a set of faces. It wasn't much, but it was one of my favorite places in the site to visit. Just who are these guys creating all this cool stuff?

At JBoss Labs, we're bringing it back. Blog feeds are king on Labs, and we're filling them with community activities and we're focusing on the developers whenever we can. As we add each project to Labs, we're going to show you the faces behind the projects with interviews and pictures of the project leads and developers--not to mention, all the project news possible.

In addition to the community focus, Labs is building out a set of project metrics to help project developers track and boost community activity. These metrics will be displayed using the Kosmos portlets, which are summarized displays of committer activity, JIRA task and bug tracking, and build status. Each project has a blog, wiki, forums, and a set of what we call 'freezones' which are a place that community projects can host any content they want, such as documentation, screenshots, and special downloads (or in the case of our PortletSwap project, community contributions).

So, this weekend JBoss Labs 1.0.1 was released and our project is shaping up nicely. One of the star projects of Labs, JBoss Wiki, was deployed on it's first release (see it in action here). JBoss Wiki is a JSR 168 compliant wiki which means that it can be deployed in any compliant portlet container, but of course we recommend deploying in JBoss Portal 2.0.

Initial features of JBoss Wiki include:
  • A plugin system which allows for different "wiki types."  So, we use plugins to translate different wikitext or add contextual content through plugin chains.
  • All wiki pages are accessible via http://server/wiki/XYZ pattern (i.e., http://labs.jboss.org/wiki/Main )
  • Fully supports the JSPWiki page syntax and formatting
  • History, rollback, and diff tools are supported.
  • Integrates, as a JSR 168 Compliant Portlet, with JBoss Portal 2.0 utilizing all security constructs provided to portlets.
  • Supports attachments for logged in users with proper permissions
  • Has an embedded search mechanism.
  • Supports a bread crumb trail.
The full road map of JBoss Wiki can be viewed at:

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBWIKI

And the road map for JBoss Labs is here:

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBLAB

JBoss Wiki is just a single project at JBoss Labs, and we are adding more. We always need community feedback. It is what Labs is all about. So, I encourage you to comment and let us know what you think and where Labs can be improved or features added. Visit our forums and tell us your thoughts.

Thanks to all in the Labs team for making this deployment a success, and a special thank you the community members who provided us with all the feedback.

Damon Sicore
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JBoss Labs Lead