Does it not get annoying to be forced to work with different wikis and each wiki having different syntaxes?

Currently I have to work with:
1. fitnesse: for our acceptance testing. Since fitnesse is meant for acceptance testing and has a horrible search functionality it stays in its own space
2. MediaWiki: The current client that I‘m working for uses MediaWiki for the project and cross team wikis. So all the important project stuff goes here. But these have horrible navigation. It also does not support RSS on all the pages.
3. Confluence: At my current company we use Confluence for internal use. It is pretty powerful. But my biggest complain is, it‘s licensed, not open sourced. It is difficult to convince my client to buy confluence.
4. VQWiki: Currently I‘m playing with VQWiki. It uses Lucene as its search engine. I was looking to integrate lucene with Fitnesse and that‘s how I got introduced to vqwiki. Now we use it for our refactoring fest at the Agile Philly User Group.

You will be surprised to see how many different wikis are available out there. List of wiki software

I see a big problem having so many wikis with lack of open standards across these wikis. None of the wikis seem to understand each other‘s format. Right now the only way to avoid information lock down is to write some crazy scripts to port data from one wiki to another. This is certainly not a sustainable model as more and more companies switch to wikis for team collaboration.

Over the last couple of days I was wondering how to hot deploy webapps in Tomcat? After trying all possible search queries in Google I gave up. But I knew for sure that it was possible to hot deploy webapps in Tomcat, as I had done it before.

I started playing with Sysdeo Eclipse Tomcat Launcher plugin. This plugin had an option to make the context reloadable. It actually updates the server.xml under the tomcat/conf dir. This is how I figured out how to make this work for any webapp.

Just add the following line to the server.xml

<Context path=”/yourContext” reloadable=”true” docBase=”rootFolderOfYourApp” />


Now I don‘t have to stop and start tomcat for a small change in a class file to reflect.