Some interesting feedback from a tapestry user about HiveMind: Hi James,
Excuse the rough email. My Apple Mail client decided to be difficult overnight and I've had to switch to Thunderbird. Yes, good idea about my giving you more feedback. I'll try to put aside some time on Saturday afternoon to give you some constructive criticism about the Hivemind doc.s. I do remember becoming frustrated that the documentation was not simple. For example, if I want to learn about a configuration I have to read through this: "A central concept in HiveMind is /configuration extension points/. Once you have a set of services, it's natural to want to configure those services. In HiveMind, a configuration point contains an unordered collection of /elements/. Each element is contributed by a module ... any module may make contributions to any configuration point visible to it." This is quite frustrating to read. I don't really care about elements, at this stage, I just want a simple definition of how a configuration works in Hivemind and what I can do with it. The element, contribution, and module definitions which are thrown in, and themselves require definition, make it really complex. The documentation then trails off into definitions of everything else but a configuration point. Still, what does a configuration point do? What kind of options do I have to configure services? What are some common needs for this sort of thing? I general description of my impression - documentation *should* give a quick overview of key concepts. The detailed stuff is perhaps good but it's mixed in with an introduction to the basic concepts and, as a result, the reader walks away feeling confused. Cheers, Nick /Nick, If you can point to any specific issues with the HiveMind documentation that made it difficult for you, I'd be glad to try to rectify them. I'm one of the committers on the HiveMind project. By the way, have you read my article on HiveMind at TheServerSide.com (http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=HivemindBuzz)? I'm not saying it's the best article in the world or anything, but it does give a good introduction to HiveMind and I have received a lot of positive feedback from folks about it. It doesn't cover configurations, but I plan on doing a follow-up article to address that. I'm sorry to hear that your experience with HiveMind has been so painful, but we need feedback like yours to make it better! Thanks and I hope that article helps. James -----Original Message----- From: Nick Faiz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 10:42 PM To: Tapestry users Subject: Re: tapestry for a webwork developer Ive been using webwork 2 previously to this, my first project with Tapestry (4.0). I think the weirdest thing was accepting the idea of using ASO's (Application State Objects), whereas in webwork 2 we coded to a stateless model. I still have to see how it scales but we're running with it for now. I'm also still not sure how, or even if, Tapestry meets the needs of interceptors for pages and services alike. This was very clear in an xwork.xml file, thanks to interceptor stacks. If anyone can point me to an example of an interceptor which can be function within Tapestry's framework I would be grateful (please don't reply and suggest I use a ServletFilter - I mean Tapestry's framework). Besides that there are differences - Tapestry is excellent at the modular component thing, Webwork 2 is a little messier but makes for a faster development path. I find that I'm often fussing about with bindings and the like in .page and .jwc files. On the other hand, the configuration effort might be worth it, given how easily I can drop a component in somewhere. I find Hivemind to be very verbose and complex compared to Spring. The documentation for Hivemind is sometimes lengthy and indirect and can be frustrating. Hivemind is running well within our project, but whenever I seek to learn more about it's workings I find myself preferring to read the source code. On the other hand, I'm really enjoying using Tapestry and Hivemind. If I work with it again I'd like to experiment with configuring Velocity or Freemarker at the template level and see how else I could customize it. I might, perhaps, try and involve Spring, rather than using Hivemind as the IoC framework. Cheers, Nick On 15/04/2006, at 6:24 AM, Payne, Matthew wrote: We can use Tapestry 4. It looks like I need to take a look at the specifics of applying these services. Thanks. Matt / James Carman, President Carman Consulting, Inc. James Carman, President Carman Consulting, Inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
