Hello Dylan,
> (... about lack of documentation)
> And it isn't like it isn't a known problem. Almost every review of Orion I have
> seen points out this glaring fact. And this mailing list is seething with people
> patiently waiting for something that should be already written.
Absolutely, documentation is our biggest and most important task (as I've pointed out
many times on this list)
>
> How about the whole orion team just STOPS coding for a week... (I don't
> care about 1.2.10!!!)... and fill in the gaps in the documentation. I think it
> would be a very productive move.
Well, even though you might not care about getting new versions every day (of course
noone cares for every update) there are many people who are running Orion on their
production sites serving thousands
of people, or are in the process of going live, and if they find a bug we try to help
them with it. We get an enormous amount of reports and requests for enhancements and
new features and if we stopped
developing for a whole week we would get far behind on helping our customers, and
believe me, a week of documentation isn't enough to improve documentation in that many
areas that it makes it worth to
stop responding to everyone.
All I can say is that we are working on documentation (when we're not working on
explaining that we are working on documentation ;) ) and that we are aware of the
amounts of documentation that you need
to work with a product of this complexity. A big problem is also that things are
moving so fast. We make something available as a preview (like EJB 2.0) and of course
people want documentation and
examples the day after (understandable), but it's a tough task to work that fast.
>
> Yes, I know the "price is right"... but come *ON*... inexpensive means nothing if
> the features you need are available but undocumented.
Of course. We are working like this: When we have a new feature we start out by giving
a little documentation on it so that everything is at least documented (although very
briefly) and then we follow
up with more complete documentation, but those usually take a fair bit longer to
produce. Examples are SSL, Clustering and user management that have had very sparse
documentation so far (but Clustering
was improved today), and we are working on providing complete tutorials and how-to's
about these subjects.
We understand that you need complete and good documentation to work with our product,
and if you can not live with the state of the current documentation, you should of
course look at other products
that fit your needs better. We are doing our best to make sure that Orion is the best
J2EE server and we certainly are working on making sure that everyone can use it, and
I think we've taken big steps
in this direction lately, with a few noticable additions like the Bugzilla, the
improvements to the Changelog and the new documentation that's starting to pop up,
like the clustering doc, The start to
the GUI tools tutorial, the start to the Filter tutorial, The CMP Primer (not on the
site yet, but available at www.jollem.com/orion-cmp-primer/ (yeah, Ernst is writing
some documentation for Orion
"officially" now)) and a few other docs that are in the later stages of production.
Eventually we will get there.
Regards,
Karl Avedal
