Sebastien Arbogast wrote:
Messy or poor documentation is a reason why some open-source software around here at my new job (a large regional medical care network) gets disqualified from use. If it takes the devs around here too long to figure out how to use it, out the door it goes.Can it be shown that this downward trend is not a result of improving
documentation?
Or maybe it's because the documentation is still so "messy" (I'm sure
it's going to change with the new effort but it's still the case) that
more and more people try Cocoon, don't manage to figure it out and
finally fall back to better documented alternative solutions. At least
it's the way I personally feel it because I'm convinced that IF the
objective is to make the community wider, documentation is the key.
But it's just my personal opinion ;-)
One of my long-term goals here is to introduce everybody to Cocoon and possibly even use it in at least one project successfully. All of the development right now is done with Struts and JSP/Taglibs. Despite this, there's still too much complexity and it's hard to figure out where everything happens. If I had Cocoon/CForms + Hibernate/Spring, I could probably develop stuff pretty fast. We already use Spring, and I think we're on the cusp of actually adpoting Hibernate, but right now I'm pretty skeptical about getting Cocoon in the door with the documentation the way it is, so now I'm motivated to "do." :)
I've said it many times before, and I'll say it again: PHP's documentation is superior. We need to follow their model.
- Tony (Who's been *way* too busy with new job after graduating to work on anything remotely fun anymore.
