> But for software to stand up in the marketplace, surely it has to be
> usable to the most appropriate amount of people? Didn't HTML 'take off'
> as a page creation/web publishing tool only when people wrote good
> HOWTO's and 'newbie' guides? Surely a goal of yours and the whole Apache
> project is for your code to be used by as many people as possible? Why
> not make it easier to do so?
The point that you are missing is that the original "developers" of the
HTML specification didn't write the documentation. I keep
saying this over and over again...Personally, I'm not concerned with
"standing up in the marketplace"...I know my software works. I know my
software rocks. I don't have to prove it to anyone else. People who "get
it" get to take advantage of that fact. If someone doesn't "get it", then
I expect them to take the time to try to learn the stuff. I'm totally
willing to answer specific questions about things and do so all the
time.
Also, the comparison to Apache doesn't really work that well...Apache is a
royal pain in the ass to configure. How many newbie's know how to write
regex to configure mod_rewrite? There are efforts to make nice idiot gui
configuration systems for it...but they will never remove the ability for
someone to actually just sit down and learn how to do this stuff
themselves.
> I'd agree with that and to be honest my reaction now is to offer to
> create some HOWTO-like documentation and offer it up to the project.
> Would this be useful?
Ask yourself that question. You obviously have an issue with the current
set of documentation that we provide.
> Look at it another way, I had two set's of HTML generation classes in
> front of me. I chose the one that was easiest to adopt. It was as simple
> as that.
The silly thing that I would like to point out is that ECS is no harder to
learn than htmlKona. You could have simply looked at the documentation for
htmlKona and then applied that to ECS.
new A()
or
new AnchorElement()
or new B()
or new BoldElement()
It isn't that hard.
> To re-iterate a point I made earlier, I am new to Java, but I'm not new
> to web development. I picked up servlets easily and have built database
> driven intranets quite successfully. But my stumbling block was ECS, so
> I had to go around it. I'd love to use it because of it's functionality.
So, then take the time to sit down and learn it. It really isn't that
hard. You will find that all your ranting is totally useless because it
really is so easy to use/learn. One reason that there has been no
documentation for newbie's is that most people, like you, tend to rant
about no documentation...then they sit down...start using it and realize
it is a piece of cake to learn/use and then figure out that there really
isn't much to document...
> Jon, please don't take my rantings personally. I understand that you are
> a developer and it's more useful for you to remain so. I view this as a
> shortcoming of the project, not yourself personally. Is it that no-one
> wants to write documentation or is there a view that it's not necessary?
It isn't that it isn't necessary...it is that the API is silly stupid to
learn/use. It just takes some time to sit down and learn it and play
around with the code...
-jon
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