David,
I have found your new tutorial very useful. It was the first Jetspeed Tutorial from which I actually
created a working Jetspeed install. I am also learning to use Eclipse with this project (My dev
environment has been IDEA) so I can follow the tutorial and posts to this mail-list.
Here is some end-user feedback from where I struggled (not to criticize - meant purely as
constructive feedback):
1) http://people.apache.org/~taylor/tutorial/docs/site/01/first-steps.html you offer a link to the
"Tutorial Download Location". When I click this link I found 4 files which confused me - which do I
need? Where do I expand them? I would suggest the tutorial say something like,
"You will find the following 4 files: jetexpress.zip, express-demo.zip, Jetspeed-installer,
jetspeed-libraries.zip. In this tutorial we will expand the jetexpress.zip in directory
/JetspeedTraining/. Expand jetspeed-libraries into directory /JetspeedTraining/libraries/. We will
use the express-demo.zip in section-03 of this tutorial."
2) There is actually an instruction hidden (IMHO) in
http://people.apache.org/~taylor/tutorial/docs/site/references/tutorial_distribution.html. The setup
of the JETSPEED_LIBRARY I suggest be a tutorial step rather than a file description. I suggest any
step _required_ by the tutorial should be described _in the tutorial_, and not in a link off of the
tutorial (though I understand this is difficult in a ever-growing and -changing project like Jetspeed).
3) The tutorial in later pages assumes a certain directory structure. I suggest it be described in
this first page while you tell users which files to expand and where. For example, in describing the
changes to build.properties you offer the example:
app.server.home = /JetspeedTraining/servers/tomcat-express
I did not know how this path translated to my local file system. From this and the rest of the
tutorial I have gleaned that your examples assume the jetexpress.zip was expanded into a directory
called /JetspeedTraining/. This is also where my Eclipse newbiness hampered me as I did now know how
to define a new "workspace" to use this directory - but as you say in other posts, that was *my*
problem and beyond the scope of the tutorial.
4) http://people.apache.org/~taylor/tutorial/docs/site/01/install-it.html says "if you are following
the training material, the Tomcat directory is located under /JetspeedTraining/tomcat-express/".
Actually it is "/JetspeedTraining/servers/tomcat-express/".
5) http://people.apache.org/~taylor/tutorial/docs/site/01/install-it.html perhaps should indicate
what values we should use when running the installer. Now, in hind-site, I suppose you mention in
the bullets "/JetspeedTraining/tomcat-express/" to say this is the value I should tell the installer
is my "Tomcat Home".
6) <soapbox> A hint I would offer any new users on the first page is, "If you deviate from these
instructions, you may find later steps do not work. I suggest you change values or settings only
after you have got the tutorial working." I imagine new users come to Jetspeed with their own
project in mind; so, as they follow the tutorial they tweak a step here and their not realizing that
the effects of those tweaks which might make later instructions not work. For example, "For the
purposes of the tutorial, stick to the included tomcat, and use derby; once that works, then try to
change databases or Tomcat locations."</soapbox>
These were just thoughts I had while following the tutorial. I hope they are received as
constructive criticisms and NOT as complaints. By the end of section-1 I had a working Jetspeed
install - way cool!
Steve B.
David Sean Taylor wrote:
On Aug 20, 2007, at 12:04 AM, Sari wrote:
Hello,
This is to follow up on my own posting last week.
After asking the question last week, I did some more searching on
the mailing list and found out you can download the entire
repository, so I downloaded
http://www.bluesunrise.com/maven2/repository.zip, removed the
<Mirrors> section from settings.xml, generated the jetexpress portal
and built it.
I've finally got "mvn -P tomcat,min" to end successfully :-)
Now I can move on to the next step.
Could someone please confirm if this actually was the correct way to
build a custom portal?
Well, this is the current recommended approach:
http://wiki.apache.org/portals/Jetspeed2/Maven2BuildSupport
backed by the tutorial:
http://portals.apache.org/tutorials/jetspeed-2/
Recently, due to complaints from newbies about the difficulties of using
Maven-2, I decided to try a simpler method of building, with Ant +
Eclipse as described here:
http://people.apache.org/~taylor/tutorial/docs/site/index.html
So I recommend trying the Ant + Eclipse approach if you are having
trouble with the recommended Maven-2 tutorial, or just Maven-2 itself
Beware that the Ant Tutorial only goes as far as section 01 a
I was hoping to receive feedback about how easy it was to use and if
people found the getting started section, which they usually have so
much difficulty with, easier than Maven
Thus far I haven't really had an useful feedback to help me understand
what people would prefer
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