Sunday 26 November 2017

New project : wiki and JavaHelp replacement

I have developed a new Java project from some time which allows to generate a wiki from a set of XML-formatted files.

The reason for this is that some time ago sourceforge removed their default mediawiki implementation. I created an extensive wiki then for the j661 project, which was lost except if I set myself again this wiki on sourceforge with the appropriate server, or used the new (simpler) wiki they provided. This was however still a problem even if I did this because the help content could not be easily shared (for example, I would like to be able to generate a documentation as a website and allow users to download the documentation.

There are a lot of offerings available, but those which are using a server have the same problem. And sometimes they might decide to change the format, for example with confluence.

I then decided to create a Java project to allow to generate a "static" wiki, called https://sourceforge.net/projects/docjgenerator/. This works very well for my use cases, I now use this tool for the documentation for all my open source (or even closed source) projects. The generation has many options, it is possible to perform the generation on the command-line, from a GUI, or from ant. The XML-based syntax is also really rich (and IMO not more complicated than mediawiki is, and I edit on wikipedia a lot). It is even possible to create article with a subset of the mediawiki syntax if you want.

Recently I also added a JavaHelp-like content generation to the generator. basically the same content specification can produce a zip file which can be used to add a Help component in a Swing or JavaFX application.