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01/02/2006: "Wiki Power"

The first week was manly filled with admin tasks and general getting to know AppSwing and its technologies. With the basics out of the way I needed to information quickly and have it stick, Neil came up with a novel idea for me to do this which involved using a wiki to record what I had learned about AppSwing. This was a benefit to the company as it meant they had a source of data about them and their technology and it was also usefull for me as I grounded the knowledge I was gaining and gained experience in wiki technology, ASP, IIS, and not to forget AppSwing.

The wiki has gone through many stages, I began with a very simple wiki which was great as a start but didn't give me the functionality and freedom I required. I learnt ASP to try and add the functionality I required but in the end I would have been changing it so much that I might as well find a new one, which I did.
I tried to find one that was written in ASP so I could change it if I needed to and so I came across OpenWikiNG which was far more complicated and so knowing the basics really came in useful. After using this for a bit I again realised this was not the wiki for AppSwing, which in part was due to my manager seeing the potential of wiki technology and asking for it to be more than just a wiki. He wished to use it as a support tool and to have AppSwing's Knowledge Base implemented using the wiki. This meant it would be on a public facing server and so would need more security than OpenWikiNG could offer. Off I go again, this time I didn't restrict myself to ASP, the world of wikis was my mollusc (as long as they worked with IIS).
I found TWiki which provided everything I needed and more, it is written in Perl and needs some fiddling to get it working with IIS but once it is set up it works great and has lots and lots of features.
I am still playing with it to get it just the way I want but the basics are there, it has also been good what it was originally intended for as I now have a good understanding of AppSwing's technologies.

There have been many debates on the usefulness of wikis and whether when used by the public for things like Wikipedia how reliable the information stays.
I however find wikis and the whole concept of them very interesting and I believe them to be a powerful tool.