nEvill

Confluence is my favourite wiki product, having used it for a couple of years at clients and also with the free personal version.  Although it’s a great application there is one issue, the price…  implementing it in smaller dev shops is just not viable so I have been looking around for a suitable replacement.

Xwiki caught my eye on http://www.wikimatrix.org/ and I’ve been trialling it for a week or so.  Downsides are it’s a java based solution but once you get over that it does a very good job.  Proper user, group and space funcionality complement the very impressive wysiwyg editor.  So far so good… will update how it pans out in the long term.

 If Atlassian provided a small company license that was affordable it would be good but they obviously don’t care for that market and only focus on the Entreprise users, shame.

Colleagues who have to endure my sense of humour also have to enjoy my appreciation of Nant, the .net developer’s best friend.  Recently I’ve been using it to build databases during CruiseControl.net builds to enable a very complicated upgrade project to progress with some degree of order. Nanting the database build using Ruby on Rails style migrations is a great way to tie code builds to database builds.  I’ll dig out the generic nant script for reference as it’s a very handy technique. So what can’t you Nant?  Well, not a lot and that’s my point… if it moves, automate it.  The only thing distracting me from my enjoyment of Nant is Watir, another cracking product which I’m using all day every day to drive my web application testing… now if I can only hook up Watir with Nant.