Its taken a while, but the Linux version of Google’s Chrome is really starting to catch up with its Windows counterpart, both in terms of features and stability.

I have been using the dev releases of Chrome for a while now and recently I have been able to make the switch to using it as my default channel. In fact, I haven’t used Firefox in weeks!

Getting the web browser is easy if you are using a Debian based distribution, such as Ubuntu. Simply download the package from the Chromium website and the package manager will do the rest. Not only will it install the browser, it will also add the Google repository so you are kept up to date.

Most of the features that you would expect from a web browser are now complete, including Flash support. Extensions are also now available, although not yet completely implemented on Linux. One of the main features that you might miss is printing, so keep another browser available.

I have made the move to using Chrome as my default browser on Linux mainly because Firefox 3 is just so slow, and not just at the rendering of pages. On my desktop, start up takes upwards of 10 seconds. Chrome doesn’t take more than 3.

Where Chrome really shines is on my netbook. Once Firefox loads, it can only handle around 4 tabs before it really starts to feel sluggish, and GMail is just unusable. Chrome does not have these problems. I can have half a dozen tabs open, including GMail, and my netbook is still just as responsive.

Of course, it is still an early release, so there is the odd problem. I have noticed once or twice that Chrome can eat up the CPU, and playing a Flash video can sometimes be a bit flaky. But these happen rarely, and even with this I already feel that Chrome is the best web browser available on Linux.

Kino Search is a Perl port of the Lucene indexed based search engine from Apache. The Foswiki extensions use this to provide fast, full text search of both topics and attachments. The attachments that can be indexed include MS Office 2003 and 2007 documents and PDF files.

This original add-on was available for TWiki but I have now ported this over as a new KinoSearchContrib and KinoSearchPlugin and made many improvements, including:

• Fast CGI and mod_perl support
• Indexing MS Office 2007 files
• Much more resilient indexing
  • In particular when indexing password protected files or when an incorrect file type is supplied (such as attaching a image and calling it myfile.txt)
• Using more of the official Foswiki API
• Improved documentation and templates

There have been other technical improvements that are behind the scenes. The extensions also comes with a good testing suite, helping to ensure that it is of good quality.

For more information, see my posting on the official Foswiki blog (although remember that I wrote both, so the wording is similar…).

This certainly isn’t very elegant. Luckily by using Michael Daum’s Filter Plugin we can improve the index by giving it some structure and making it more like a directory, as shown below:

To do this we only need to make a small change to the WebTopicList in the System web. Since all the other webs simply import that page the changes will be immediately visible across the wiki with just the one change.

Edit the WebTopicList topic and replace this line:

%TOPICLIST{"   * [[%BASEWEB%.$name][$name]]"}%

With this:

%MAKEINDEX{"%TOPICLIST{"$name" separator=","}%" cols="3" header="$anchors" format="[[%BASEWEB%.$item][$item]]"}%

Thats it! You now get a much more friendly and useful index in all of your webs.

Note: This tip has also been made available on foswiki.org.

• Delicious
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon

The add on is used with the %INCLUDE% macro, which among other things can grab a section of a topic. For example, to create a link to Digg, you would include the “digg” section of the SocialBookmarkingAddOn topic with the following macro:

%INCLUDE{"System.SocialBookmarkingAddOn" section="digg" }%

This would be fine if you only wanted one link on a small amount of pages, but is obviously a lot of typing if you want to add five links to many pages. Luckily in Foswiki we can easily create our own macros in our SitePreferences topic, or our WebPreferences topic if we only want them in one web. So by adding the following, we can use the %SOCIALBOOKMARKS% macro in any topic we want it:

   * Set SOCIALBOOKMARKS = %INCLUDE{"System.SocialBookmarkingAddOn" section="delicious" }% %INCLUDE{"System.SocialBookmarkingAddOn" section="digg" }% %INCLUDE{"System.SocialBookmarkingAddOn" section="reddit" }% %INCLUDE{"System.SocialBookmarkingAddOn" section="facebook" }% %INCLUDE{"System.SocialBookmarkingAddOn" section="stumbleupon" }%

Hopefully some might this useful. This add on also shows just how flexible and powerfull Foswiki can be straight out of the box.

History of the Project

The syntax highlighter started life as the dp.SyntaxHighlighter in 2004 and was hosted at dreamprojections.com^[1].

In May 2007 the 1.5 version was released and the syntax highlighter was moved onto Google Code^[2] with some good improvements. The 1.5.1 version was released in August 2007 with some bug fixes^[3], and this was the last release before the new 2.0 version this week.

In between the 1.5 versions and the 2.0 version there has been very little activity. Bug reports and support for more languages were posted but there was very little response from Alex Gorbatchev and the project seem stagnate^[4].

Popularity

The syntax highlighter became fairly popular and is used on the site for the YUI JavaScript Library^[5] and on the Mozilla Developer Center^[6].

There has also been plugins developed to implement the highlighter in Wordpress^[7], and I have developed a plugin for TWiki^[8] and Foswiki^[9] that integrates version 1.5.1 of the syntax highlighter into these platforms.

The New License

The 2.0 version of the syntax highlighter is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, as was the 1.5 release. However the 2.0 version has one major exception to the license which classes the software as donationware. This is the quote from the website:

SyntaxHighlighter is donationware. You are allowed to download, modify and distribute the source code in accordance with LGPL 2.1 license, however if you are using SyntaxHighlighter 2.0 on your site or including it in your product, you must donate.^[10]

Whilst many open source software developers ask for donations, this exception seems to suggest you must donate to Alex Gorbatchev if you want to use the highlighter on their site. There is no set amount that you need to donate, with Alex just stating that “you’d at least buy me a beer”^[11].

So while we are free to upgrade any plugins for Wordpress or Foswiki to the 2.0 version, any site that used it would be forced to pay for it. From my point of view, there is no way I would think of using the 2.0 version with this restriction. While many users may be happy to donate, by using it in my Foswiki plugin I would be forcing everyone to donate to use the plugin.

Summary

The JS Syntax Highlighter is a nice piece of software, but with the new release it is no longer free to use on your site or in a product. Since the 2.0 version has no big improvements over the 1.5 version released two years ago it would be hard justify paying for it, unless you really want to donate.

There are also many other client side syntax highlighters, such as SHJS, Prettify and JUSH, and since the 1.5 version is open source it would be possible to fork the software and continue development on it. So for me there really does not seem to be any incentive to pay for a client side syntax highlighter.

Links

• SyntaxHighlighter
• Donationware on Wikipedia

References

1. Way Back Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20050306062439/http://www.dreamprojections.com/syntaxhighlighter/
2. http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/wiki/Version_1_5
3. http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/wiki/Version_1_5_1
4. Issues list on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/syntaxhighlighter/issues/list
5. Syntax Highlighter on YUI Home Page (still using version 1.3): http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/connection/
6. Syntax Highlighter on the Mozilla Developer Center (using version 1.5.1): https://developer.mozilla.org/en/New_in_JavaScript_1.7
7. Syntax Highlighter Plus plugin for Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/syntaxhighlighter-plus/
8. DpSyntaxHighlighter plugin for TWiki: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/DpSyntaxHighlighterPlugin
9. DpSyntaxHighlighter plugin for Foswiki: http://foswiki.org/Extensions/DpSyntaxHighlighterPlugin
10. SyntaxHighlighter license: http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter#License
11. SyntaxHighlighter donate page: http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter:Donate

With the 1.0 release the software has been re-branded in order to remove any trademark violations that could potentially be sued by the TWiki trademark holders. There has also been a number of bug fixes (~120)^[2] from the version of TWiki that it was forked from (TWiki 4.2.3).

Foswiki 1.0 vs TWiki 4.2.4

The significant difference between Foswiki 1.0 and TWiki 4.2.4 is the branding. With TWiki being a trademarked name, the fork needed to rebrand the namespace of the code and many of the topics. For example, in TWiki all the documentation is stored in the TWiki web. This has had to be renamed to the System web.

Although there are no differences in main features between the two, Foswiki includes all the bug fixes from TWiki up to 4.2.4, plus the others that have been submitted by the Foswiki community. Therefore it could be said that Foswiki 1.0 is slightly more mature than TWiki 4.2.4.

Compatibility with TWiki

Nothing has changed in the way data is stored in Foswiki. Therefore webs and topics can easily be moved between the two software. However, as the namespace of the code has had to be re-branded, TWiki plugins are no longer compatible. This is why the TWikiCompatabilityPlugin has been written. It enables you to install any plugins available on TWiki.org on Foswiki (well, as long as they used the official plugins API). The other option is to port the TWiki plugins over to the Foswiki namespace.

On Foswiki.org you are able to download plugins that have been ported to the Foswiki namespace. There are also plugins available to download that are still in the TWiki namespace. This is because a lot of developers have been locked out of TWiki.org and so they can only contribute to the fork, but they still need to support their TWiki installs until the time is right for them to be upgraded. Therefore they are able to contribute upgraded versions of their extensions while keeping them compatible with TWiki.

Foswiki or TWiki?

If you are new to both these projects then I would recommend Foswiki. Having been subscribed to both mailing lists it is clear that there is much more activity in the Foswiki community and many more checkins to their Subversion repository^[3]. On the other hand there has been hardly any activity on the TWiki mailing lists, with many days the only emails sent out is the warning of unit test failures^[4].

If you are comming from TWiki and are wondering if you should move with the fork, then its a tough decision. While there is clearly more activity on Foswiki, at the end of the day both of these have the same features and a stable code base. So for the moment the best thing is probably to wait until Foswiki has had time to innovate and release some new features and/or extensions that TWiki does not have. If/when this happens then it may be time to move with the fork.

So what’s the future for TWiki? Well, it recently had its 10th birthday when project leader (and TWIKI.NET founder) Peter Theony promised a new release in January or February that will “advance TWiki as a web 2.0 player”^[5]. It will be interesting to see if they meet that release target and what new features it has. Who knows, perhaps he has something special up his sleeve that will bring back some developers and activity to the TWiki project? Only time will tell.

Links

• Foswiki.org
• TWiki.org

References

1. Earlier blog post: TWiki and the Fork
2. Foswiki.org download page
3. Foswiki mailing lists
4. TWiki mailing lists
5. 10 Years TWiki blog post from TWiki.org

In my opinion I sympathise with the fork. It does seem that TWiki has become commercialised and TWIKI.NET want to use the project to create a product it can make money from. The ads all over twiki.org seem to confirm this. The statement from Tom Barton clearly defined what they want TWiki to be in the future, which many in the community did not agree on. This meant they needed to get rid of the community that wanted to go a different path in order to have it their own way.

So for now I have agreed to the Terms of Use at twiki.org so I can continue to maintain and support the plugins I have there. I also plan to move my plugins to the fork as soon as possible. I then hope to keep my plugins compatible with both for as long as practical. By then, it should be clear which project I want to support and this will get my full attention.

Update 18/11/08: The community decided name for the fork is Foswiki – Free and Open Source Wiki.

Links

TWiki

• TWiki.org
• TWiki relaunch statement
• TWiki.org Code of Conduct

NextWiki Foswiki

• NextWiki.org Foswiki.org
• Overview of events
• How the fork affects users

Blogs/News (in no particular order)

• WikiRing (members of the TWiki community that support the fork)
• Slashdot
• CNET
• osdir
• Digg
• Colas Nahaboo Blog
  
• Sven Dowideit Blog