Hi there,
I heard a rumor that day is planning a sling training in the near
future? Is that so and if yes, could that lead to a better documentation
for sling?
Ruben
Dominik Süß wrote:
Hi Mike,
you're not the only one who did address this issue. This pops up in the
mailing list from time-to-time and on conventions like ApacheCon last week.
The main problem about that seams that the commiters are involved in a lot
of projects (as well the apache projects as the day products). Since Sling
does not have that many other commiters there is just a lack of time for
documentation. And since there is almost nothing in the existing
documentation which isn't at least in details outdated no one except the
core team feels capable enough to write a basic documentation.
I really hope someone will do the move and try to write a basic
documentation.
The getting started guide would propably be something even someone of us
"users" could write and contribute. I would like to do this but I'm always
out of time and the rare time I have left is reserved by my girlfriend.
(planning to write something since the first official release).
I even did plan some kind of multipart tutorial which allows to start with a
simple app which grows from step to step and uses all those funky features
we have (like versioning and observations). If there is anyone out there who
wants to support me in doing this little project please mail me directly
(since I wouldn't like to spam the mailing list without having at least a
skeleton of this).
Any other ideas out there how to get better documentation?
Best regards,
Dominik
On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Mike Müller wrote:
Hi all,
First of all, I would like to thank all of you for the big efforts to
enhance and refine sling step by step. I'm watching the project since a few
months for now and tested sling in a few simple projects - and it really is
very easy to use it right from scratch.
But to be honest, it's rather hard to really get into the code of sling if
you try to build a complex app, not only based on scripting. The big problem
by now for a non-sling-insider is the documentation. The website mostly is
outdated. Dont' get me wrong, I know sling is open source and all free, so
nobody has to bother about missing things. And yes, if you try hard enough,
you also get into the details of sling. But that's the problem of the
project: I think sling is such a good project it should get out of the
incubator. The project is mature, it is tested in real projects (as Day's
CQ5) and it evolves further. It seems that the only thing which holds sling
off to get out the incubator is the list of active committers outside Day.
My company would like to move our products on a sling based core and we also
are interested to develop sling and help to enhance it. To make it easier
for others to use and also contribute to sling, I think the following things
would be as important as the source code itself:
1) an up-to-date website with documentation about the core part of sling
(like architecture, request processing, which services/interfaces are
exposed by the core of sling and which are additional services/interfaces?,
how and where can you enhance sling -> servlets, scripting, components)
2) a short getting started guide for developers e.g. how do I develop for
sling with eclipse without getting long roundtrips (or other IDEs, what's
about the eclipse plugin for jcr/sling?)
3) a short how-to guide for a real productive installation (like apache as
front server with mod_proxy or similar)
4) a separation of the core code and the additional bundles (as it is
already planed for the new release) -> maybe almost done?
It's great to hear that there will be soon a new release of sling. IMHO the
new release should be really used to get more people using sling and also to
get more people be involved in sling development. Maybe in favour of a
consistent documentation the release should be delayed.
WDYT?
regards
Mike
