wiki

The Problem

We were asked for some wiki software. One of the key requirements was that it would not require our staff to learn yet another user name and password, so it had to work with our Oracle Application Server and use the OID and Oracle's single sign-on.

We looked but couldn't find a product that did that. We then looked to see if there was an open source product that we could put some developer time into to allow it to use OID, but when we looked at the source code of a couple of candidates this did not look to be an easy option.

The products we looked at had more features and functionality than we needed, and so the source code was more complex. Additionally, the security seemed so tightly integrated into the application that it would be very difficult to refactor it.

In the end we decided to use what we had learnt and build our own.

The Solution

The bulk of the application was written by one person in four days. We gave that to our users for them to play with as release 0.1 and got back a wish list that we're working through. Version 0.2 took a further three days.

We wrote the application using Oracle JDeveloper as five of jsp pages supported by a five classes. We didn't use JSF or ADF or any framework, just straight jsp code written by hand.

We're not a big organisation (less than 1,000 employees) so we don't need to support huge numbers of concurrent users. Nor do we need to build for high availibility or have any need to meet high performance targets.

We just needed a simple little application that did the job. Here it is.