I downloaded XWiki and gave the standalone application a whirl. I’m in the market for a simple wiki, I have used JSP Wiki before and it is fine but it can be a pain to setup correctly and I would also need to figure out how to secure editing offline first (as this is meant to be a public-read, private-edit wiki). My first impression is simply one of sluggish performance. It has a lot of nice features and it does arrive locked down but viewing and editing the pages is very lethargic and the Ajax is painfully slow. This could be the server but other servers are proving snappier.

Interestingly it seems to create a database in memory and import/export the data to file on startup/shutdown. I’m not sure what the advantage of that is, it seems counter-intuitive. Looking at options for a standalone database I am unsurprised to find a not saying that Hibernate does not play well with Derby. The lack of support between products built for either Derby and HSQLDB is annoying and seems unnecessary. However from past experience I know not to try and swim against the tide on this. If the developer worked exclusively on one or the other than chances are it is going to work better with the intended platform.

I also spotted a release note about a bug that requires Tomcat Security to be switched off. That doesn’t seem to be something you want to ship with. It’s not exactly the way you play with others.