New Qi4j website!

After years with SiteVision from Senselogic, the Qi4j community has decided that SiteVision does not fulfill the needs of this community. Primarily, SiteVision can not satisfy some really central needs of open source communities;

Learning curve for SiteVision is higher than plain text tool chains. Offline editing is not possible. Distance between Sitevision server and users introduce network latencies that makes the SiteVision experience less than optimal. Versioning is non-trivial. Keeping old versions of the site up and running in parallel will be important as users seek information about older versions of the Qi4j SDK online. Integration with build system and codebase in general is fairly complex process. We are therefor saying a Big THANK YOU to Senselogic and SiteVision for the time past, but we are now excited in moving forward with a new website and an underlying toolchain for it.

The site is completely static (for now), and is built from AsciiDoc plain text documents, plus various build-time integrations with the codebase, such as code snippets, and we will expand on this in the future, including development status (dev-status.xml), any version available on website, automatic example output capturing and much more. We also hope to be able to integrate Disqus for user commentary on every page.

Already, prior to launching the new site, the new toolchain has already proven itself worthy, as much more content has been generated by the community within a short period of time.

“I think this is a great leap forward for us. Although content management systems are powerful, they don’t serve the open source community needs very well.”, says Niclas Hedhman, one of the Qi4j Core Team members.

“We have tried to provide a styling format that works across a large set of browsers, operating systems and devices.”, says Paul Merlin, another Core Team member who placed the final touches on the design.

Enjoy the new website Any feedback is welcome, either on GitHub or qi4j-dev forum at Google Groups.