I have no objections to xdocs, as it'd actually be a useful relevant tool for the point at hand. Bringing in maven just to use xdocs though is like buying a house with toolshed attached when all you wanted is a screwdriver.
It's not a case of 'not invented here', it's a case of 'not jumping off the same lemming cliff that everyone else does, just because everyone else is'. A severe example of this is xdoclet. It's a great tool, I use it and rely on it completely. However, whenever I've tried working on bits of it to improve/contribute, I throw my arms up and give up, because it's so damn unwieldy. Having to installl maven just to read the cvs docs makes me very suspicious. Heck, someone even thought it necessary to internationalise the build messages! Featuritis gone mad, from where I stand (sorry Aslak!).
Webwork's beauty to me is precisely because I don't have to commit to 20 other jars just to get trivial stuff to happen. While that too might be 'the way of the future' (if you consider the future to be jakarta projects + jakarta project wannabes), it'd be a sad day for webwork to conform to that particular wave.
I know this argument has come up before, and I hope this thread doesn't degenerate into another flamefest (hilarious as I found the last one). So please take my comments for what they are; a heartfelt plea from the webwork user/occasional contributor gallery.
On Thursday, December 12, 2002, at 06:03 AM, Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote:
Ken, You bring up a lot of interesting things here, I’ll try to reply below (note: I’m far from a documentation expert).Well, I've been looking at a bunch of technologies that we can use to buildI think people suggested Maven because it's 'the way of the future'. We have
the documentation, but I'm not convinced that Maven will help us. Maven is an
interesting project in that it does a hundred different things, but in terms
of simplicity and the information available on the website, it's not there. I
think the documentation generation features are not nearly as important in the
developer's minds in comparison to the project information, tools to simplify
build/test cycles and all the other stuff it does. It also seems to integrate
with Turbine and all these other frameworks that I didn't know exist. I think
if people were worried about bloating this part of the project with a tool
like Xalan, then they would definitely have some pretty strong opinion to not
using Maven (I think I agree with them). Since we aren't using Maven for it's
other strengths, it's kind of clumsy to start using it for documentation now
when simpler solutions make more sense.
just started to use it at work, and it is fantastic once you get it running.
As far as producing 'simple' documentation, it is very good. It uses xdoc
from Apache, which would be my preferred way to generate the documentation
(it's very simple, and 'mere mortals' can actually use it to write!).
I seriously think simple tools like Xalan are more than enough because
everyone probably has them in their classpath already, but I'm looking into
Cocoon and Forrest right now (I'll put up another post to the newsgroup about
my opinions on those) to see if they can simplify the required plumbing.
Cocoon and Forrest are huge overkill here I feel.I'm much more interested in offline documentation generation where I canWell, I'm quite sure WebWork will end up using Maven after 1.3 (ie in the
simply include the static documents, the PDF files and the source code to
build all of that (rather than include the necessary targets in the
build.xml). It doesn't make much sense to have every person in WebWork have
these documentation generation tools on their computer right now since we
haven't rolled out the documentation yet. I would only include the
documentation generation code and jars into the build.xml when we have
something we are happy with.
next few months), so using it to build documentation probably makes sense
there. As for simplicity, it couldn't be easier to generate 'maven doc' :)
iText was another library I was thinking about using due to its simplicity andGah! Let's not fall into the 'not invented here' syndrome, surely we don't
flexibility. I'd need to code a few Java classes to convert the xml document
to PDF, but this wouldn't take more than a day. Again, I would only do this
just so we wouldn't need a full-blown framework like Cocoon or Forrest. Like
others have said, it's not a good idea to have Webwork developers or the user
base that compiles from the source to be dependant on Cocoon or Forrest and I
agree with that. I'd like to look into them anyway just so I know for myself
how they work. If one of them will truly make our job much simpler to the
point where I don't have to write a line of Java code, then I'll consider
them. Otherwise, I don't see the point to use them.
need to write any tools to do this.
This is why people suggested HTML, it's much _simpler_! :)
The point is, surely the tools are an ancilliary issue? It's fairly trivial
to move between tools at any time (half an hour of copy / paste at the
most). Let's concentrate on the big issues!
Since the documentation is going to be static pages, I'll have to redesign theWell, that's the beauty of SiteMesh - just drop the documentation in and it
layout of the documentation obviously. This means that the left-side will be
a little different to accommodate the documentation while I'll probably keep
the top bar very similar. We also need to coordinate integrating this on the
www.opensymphony.com <http://www.opensymphony.com> website as well as it
won't use sitemesh or whatever other gadgets the site is using now. These
issues aren't a huge rush, but we could begin to talk about them.
will be decorated automatically. The actual HTML produced should be _very_
simple, and use CSS to style everything. That way we can reuse it in many
places.
Again - concentrate on the bigger issues of writing it, adding / moving a
logo is trivial!
Good thoughts though all of them - it's great to have someone thinking about
it. My advice, let's start simple and just get things down first - we can
worry about the details of the layout / tools later?
-mike
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