P I L A N G O

If you are interested in a great tool to do collaborative user interface design then run off to Peldi’s Balsamiq Studios website and follow the instructions to download a great new product that I am proud to have contributed to : Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki.

If you want to learn a little more about the product, Peldi wrote a fantastic product announcement on the Balsamiq Studios blog.  Thank you for the kind words Peldi !  It has been a real pleasure working with such an enthusiastic professional and I am looking forward to our future work together.  You are doing a great job on the Mockups product and as I can read your blog, there are a bunch of us that think so !  That’s what I call a milestone ! May the release of  Balsamiq Mockups for XWiki bring in many more that realize the power and flexibility of combining these two great tools.

If you have not yet experienced XWiki, then you can definitely learn more about this advanced open source wiki by going to the XWiki.org website and trying it out for yourself.  XWiki actually has a diverse product line of enterprise collaboration tools built on top of the XWiki Platform such as award winning XWiki Watch, a collaborative feed reader, or the dead simple wiki experience, XWiki Workspaces.  It will be really neat to see how Mockups will filter up into these more focused products, its a topic I’m very interested in exploring and pursuing !

Tags: Customers, XWiki by Luis Arias
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I have always been peskered by my lack of knowledge in setting up a virtual host setup in apache that would allow me to hide the name of a webapp in a proxied tomcat server.  After looking for a way to do this right with mod_proxy + mod_rewrite + ext_filter I finally came up with a simple way of doing this that involves not only apache’s site configuration but some tweaking of tomcat’s configuration as well.

What I want, let’s say for Pilango’s XWiki instance is to use URL’s like:

http://xwiki.pilango.com/bin/view/Main/

instead of repeating xwiki in the url as will happen with a default tomcat configuration:

http://xwiki.pilango.com/xwiki/bin/view/Main

I ended up also taking partial advantage of XWiki’s Short URL capabilities by setting

xwiki.showviewaction=0

In XWiki’s xwiki.cfg file and now have URL’s like this:

http://xwiki.pilango.com/bin/Main

Here’s how I did it !

My apache site file:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName xwiki.pilango.com

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8081/
ProxyPassReverse /  http://localhost:8081/
</VirtualHost>

Part of tomcat’s server.xml file that declares a dedicated service for the xwiki instance as the ROOT webapp which is done by the path=”" attribute in the Context element.

  <Service name="xwiki">
    <Connector port="8081" proxyName="xwiki.pilango.com" proxyPort="80" />
    <Engine name="xwiki" defaultHost="localhost">
      <Host name="localhost" appBase="/home/tomcat"
            unpackWars="false" autoDeploy="false"
            xmlValidation="false" xmlNamspaceAware="false">
        <Context docBase="/home/tomcat/xwiki" override="true" path="" />
      </Host>
    </Engine>
  </Service>

Et voilà !

Tags: XWiki by Luis Arias
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