I have recently returned to community activity after a period of inactivity. I have played with some of the introductory material, and things have not gone that well. :-( I think G and GEP 3.0 have very exciting content: JEE 6 and OSGi, and we are on track to be "early to market" with our certified server. I think we want to attract new users, and we want to be ready and attractive and easy to use when they come. To that end, I offer these suggestions and feedback:
1. Geronimo v3.0, or at least v3.0-M1, should be listed on the main page Documentation link http://geronimo.apache.org/documentation.html. v3.0 is on the wiki page: https://cwiki.apache.org/geronimo/ 2. I think we should have a "Getting Started" or "Quick Start" link on the home page for folks to download and start running Geronimo quickly. This page in the doc seems good: https://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC30/quick-start-apache-geronimo-for-the-impatient.html. (This page comes up first on the documentation, so maybe item 3 would address this.) 3. I don't think a version should be released unless the "Quick Start" actually works. If this is the entry point for new users, it should work for each release. For 3.0-M1, there are two JIRAs on this: GERONIMO-5488 and GERONIMO-5658. 4. Ditto for GEP. http://geronimo.apache.org/development-tools.html is pretty good, but there is no mention of 3.0-M1. 3.0 is an exciting release for JEE 6 and OSGi. Folks want to play with the technology. We should help them get started. 5. The "1-minute Hello World Web Application Tutorial" http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC22/how-to-use-geronimo-eclipse-plugin.html#HowtoUseGeronimoEclipsePlugin-DeployRunUndeployandRedeployanApplication for GEP does not work for 3.0-M1. There is a deploy problem, and a missing message problem. I think both the 1-minute and 5-minute tutorial are part of the testsuite, and hence these errors should have been caught if the testsuite were run. I recommend adding these tutorials to the testsuite if they are not there. Again, before a GEP version is released, someone should verify these tutorials work. 6. No GEP version should be released unless the testsuite passes. 7. News items on the main page http://geronimo.apache.org/ should have dates. Currently, 1 of 5 does. When was 3.0-M1 released? It takes two clicks to find out. I think dates on the download page http://geronimo.apache.org/downloads.html (the first click) would be nice. 8. There are no news items for the two recent GEP releases: 2.1.6 and 3.0-M1. I think all G and GEP releases should have news items, including dates. I think these suggestions will improve our product. Thanks, Ted Kirby
