Labs and demos are vital vehicles for attracting and retaining a new J audience. Not to say helping people rapidly acquire a new J skill.
J602 had a fine set of labs. Some run as they stand under JHS and JQt, not to mention JConsole. But we don't know which those are. M$ and IBM have an army of documenters who make sure a new version is released with a viable library of manuals and on-line helps. Comparisons are invidious. Jsoftware, being a tiny company, is pretty streamlined in that regard. Most of our documentation is written by keen users - and there's no other way to do it. 1. Could I issue an appeal from Chris Burke and myself for all contributors of j602 labs to revise them for j801? You can contact me as the focal point for this exercise (though I can't undertake to troubleshoot the inevitable technical issues--but we do have a programming forum). 2. We need a legion of grunts to do simple testing. That means running the Labs menu and choosing each lab in turn and seeing if it runs -- and if not why not. I've given up on a Control- page for this exercise. J801 is far less cross-platform than J602, so each platform needs testing separately. As I said above, you can contact me as the focal point for this exercise (though I can't undertake to troubleshoot code issues). Please contact me by PM (see IanClark on jwiki). Please don't clutter the forum with stuff on individual labs at this stage. I guess it's too much to expect you to go into Trac and fix the code yourself (though that would be stellar!). So a simple PM to me saying what works and what doesn't will do for a start. I shall endeavour to record all this somewhere on a public chart, to avoid the worst duplication of effort. I shall also broadcast progress from time to time. The immediate aim is to avoid shipping a fubar list of labs. This will initially result in a much-depleted list, but too bad! A secondary aim (pie in the sky) is to migrate all the valuable j602 labs to J801 platforms. The first objective is absurdly simple. The second absurdly difficult. There are new docs on the wiki, starting at http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Labs, which also include a section on migration. Happy testing! IanClark ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
