XWiki Technical Architecture

XWiki Technical Architecture

General Considerations

All XWiki Products (except XEclipse) are Java Web Applications and use the Servlet programming model as their entry points. Thus XWiki products can be installed in any Servlet container (Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, WebSphere, etc).

Understanding how HTTP requests are handled

HTTP Request Analysis

For each HTTP request, during the XWiki initialization phase, XWiki analyses the URL to extract information from it. For example the http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome URL generates the following information:

• The URL path contains /view/ and thus the ViewAction.java class is executed (configured in struts-config.xml and called by the Struts Action, itself configured in web.xml.
• The wiki is the main wiki (since the server name starts by www)
• The action is "view" and thus the view.vm will be rendered using Velocity
• The space asked is Main and the document's name is WebHome