HKJUG forum testing site is ready!

A testing site is up and running at http://forum.hkjug.org/forum/. Whoever see this post may go to register an account and try. I'll clear all user accounts and other data before the production launch, so please feel free to try in whatever way you like. The production link will be http://hkjug.org/forum (it doesn't work as of now)

There will be a newsgroup at nntp://news.hkjug.org (also not working yet). The NNTP is shown as started in the Jive Forums console but it doesn't listen to the 119 port at all. Probably I need to go for support.

The Jive Forums is suppose to be quite easy to setup and it should be quite mature. However, you may find some odd behavior or even exception in the user account registration, login/logout, update profile pages. The reason is Jive Forums does not fully support LDAP by default. For example, it can't register new account to LDAP. As a result, I have to program the user and group interface, my implementation possibly introduced some bugs.

In details, I have to implement my own GroupManager, UserManager, and Authentication Factory of Jive Forums to talk to my Apache Directory Server. The forum software has special requirement like it needs both a numeric and String user Id, and it got special profile fields like isEmailVisible for storing in the directory. So I have to customize the LDAP schema in order for Jive Forums to be fully functional.

Some of the potential exception page you may see is related to Spring. My LDAP code uses Spring LDAP template. Spring LDAP template, similar to JDBC Template/DAO, has an "elegant" design that it catches all exception and throw its own RuntimeException. It's really easy to develop and the code are clean as I don't need to catch exceptions. They are really genius. If the users do not enter wrong password and any lookup are always successful, there won't be any exception and it's a decent solution. But ... ....

Another major piece of work, which is not done yet, is the interface customization.

hkjug.org

The HKJUG is supposed to have a website. We have one at hkjug.dev.java.net. And I think we should build an online community for Java users in Hong Kong.

IMHO, we need to have a site better than the one at hkjug.dev.java.net.

• the site should be under the domain hkjug.org, which gives us a stronger identity.
  
  
• connection speed from HK is important. Not sure if it is caused by using https, the java.net site is quite slow to me. It's better to host our site in HK.
  
  
• Easy to edit is a key to success. The current java.net requires editing html and commit with CVS. As suggested in point 14 of How to make a successful Java User Group, an easy and flexible Content Management System should be used. And in this Web 2.0 era, I think we should go for a wiki which is essentially a lightweight CMS that offers easy online editing function.
  

Given that there are good enough Java wiki platforms, I would rule out the php options. I also prefer open source than commercial products. (re. commercial products, I refer to commercial products that offer a free community edition to JUG) I checked the list from java-source, wikipedia and wikimatrix. (manageability.org does not have a wiki section) JAMWiki and XWiki looks particular good. JAMWiki has no WYSIWYG editor. XWiki offers more than just page creation and editing. At the commercial side, Confluence is a definite winner.

To get our hkjug.org website, we just need a simple wiki for the HKJUG exco to publish content. It's certainly ok to use a powerful wiki that is easy to setup. At this point, I can't find reason not to use Confluence. (unless I make open source as a criteria in selection) It's so easy to setup, and it got so many bonus features. The customization of layout require some efforts, but it's the same case for any wiki.

Other than a website, the online community is important. We have a newsgroup but it does not have too much traffic. A web forum will probably do a better job. Jive Forums offers free community license. In the past, I have evaluated JForum but it's far from Jive Forums. JiveForum offers all web, newsgroup (nntp) and mail list channels and it's very promising, and it will be adopted.

In the Web 2.0 era, the meaning of online community grows beyond just a discussion forum. Most community platform offers user to create their own spaces of blog and photo sharing. XWiki is exactly for providing such functions. That's why I would want to go for it.

The first challenge I am facing is about user repository. As I've picked community edition of commercial software, there is not much difficulty to setup the products. But it's not that easy to make all these products to share the same user database/directory. Another issue is about consistency in design, I think I've gave up this requirement already.

Where on earth is the HKJUG?

Today, HKJUG is linked together with all JUGs in the world on the same map. Take a look at the customized version of the map.

Exco blog and Jira are up today

This is the first post. Thanks Google for providing the google app and blogger.

This blog is for logging the works of the HKJUG exco as record. It's not an official communication channel, and I plan to setup an official blog at our hkjug.org website for things like event announcement.

For today, we've got:

• This blog site @ http://blog.hkjug.org
  
  
• Google app - we've moved our email to Google App, and the other Google App features like calendar, docs etc. are available to us.
• www.hkjug.org is currently hosted in Google. It is planned to move to our own server.
  
  
• JIRA Issue tracking system @ http://issue.hkjug.org . It's up and running and everyone can register an account and watch our works.