I think you'd likely get takers ... and I'd like to help.
Great news.
The mechanism we have for publishing examples is pretty scalable ... each example stands on its own and doesn't affect the size of the framework download. Therefore, I don't think its necessarily a bad thing for examples to have overlapping sets of functionality, because they will likely focus on different combinations of features to show off together. Therefore, I don't think there would be any reason not to want the app you described above.
Multiple examples is probably the way to go but we don't want to stretch ourselves too thin either. Maybe 2 or 3 sets of examples showing different combinations of technologies? Concerning the downloads, I just realized Wendy left out the apps directory in her proposal. Are those just going to be part of the single framework release? (I'm thinking after examples have been in the sandbox if we go that route.) I guess you are envisioning a shale-1.0.0.tar.gz and a shale-apps-1.0.0.tar.gz bundle coming from the same release cycle?
JPA is supported ... at least by Spring 2. However, if you aren't using Spring for anything else it's a lot of extra conceptual overhead to *require* it ... JPA + JSF handle all the basic stuff already (dependency injection, transactions, etc.).
Interesting. I will have to somehow find time to look into that.
Sounds like this might really be a series of sample apps that share a common persistence tier -- and that would be a good thing. We definitely can use examples that go beyond the "hello, world" level of some potential ways to integrate these technologies together.
I was actually thinking a single app with different persistence implementations but I see some advantages to what your proposing. If we agreed on a "concept" for our examples apps we could model the domain layer in its own artifact. Maybe also the service layer interfaces ...
I'd love to see something like this in Shale (presuming you're using Shale as part of the infrastructure, of course :-).
Of course I will be using Shale. Right now I plan on using shale-test, shale-dialog, shale-tiger and the view controller stuff.
Thinking a bit further, we might want to also toy with the idea of an examples catalog that concisely documents the technologies featured in each example, plus a consistent format for the website associated with each sample that discusses the design patterns employed, highlights interesting implementation points, and mentions alternative approaches.
Sounds good. I'm also thinking that it would be cool to show off some of this stuff at ApacheCon (and other such conferences.) Are you planning on doing a Shale presentation (or two?) at Apache Con this year? I hesistate to volunteer for anything more right now but I might be able to help out presenting some stuff. Especially if its just a walkthrough of the application I would be working on over the next several weeks.
Craig
Sean
