Elsie Overview

Elsie is a wiki or wikiwiki web clone written in Java. To know what a wiki is, take a look at WikiWikiWeb or try Google. Here is also a list of open source wiki engines written in Java.

NOTE: Currently I am redesigning and refactoring the Elsie project. Please check the mission page for details.

Why Yet Another Wiki Engine

Since there are many wiki engines in Java, why yet another one? What's the difference between Elsie and other wiki engines? That is a critical question that I asked myself too before started this project.

Popular Wiki Features

As a wiki engine, Elsie supports most popular wiki features, including:

  • Simple wiki markup syntax
  • Content management (view, edit, attachment, etc.)
  • Version control (page history, diff, revert, etc.)
  • Access control list and user/group management
  • Configurable look-and-feel using layout templates and css
  • Document templates to ease creation of common documents
  • I18N and multi-lingual supports
  • Search

Clean and Clear Architecture

Elsie is designed not only for end users, but also for developers. Thus the application architecture is considered very important. A simple kernel is abstracted as a subproject, which implements the wiki framework and provides a clearly-defined, servlet-independent wiki API set. The IoC design pattern is utilized in the design of kernel: all dependent components are defined in the wiki configuration file, and are loaded and injected into the kernel during runtime. This approach makes Elsie highly flexible and extensible.

License

Elsie is available under the Apache Software License, Version 2.0.