I have to confess, I'm a newbie. I've been a C/C++ programmer for 20 years, but after dinking around for a few months with ASP, VBScript, PHP and a few other technologies, I decided that Java was the language to build my web apps in.
A month ago I was completely cold. Didn't know the first thing about any of this stuff. But I knew I wanted to learn it, so off I went, marching into the high weeds. First I had to learn Java. Then came servlets and JSPs and Tomcat. And along that path I also had to absorb Ant. And JUnit. And Log4J. And then there was a bunch of time lost exploring NetBeans/Eclipse/WebSphere before settling on JEdit as my environment of choice. Then came Struts, and all the various taglibs. An experiment with Cayenne. And Cactus. And god-knows what else I've explored. And through it all, I am continually amazed at the strength and breadth of the resources and support available. And equally frustrated by it. I can never remember where I saw a particular bit of information. So when I finally learn enough to understand what Ted was talking about in his monograph on Connection Pooling, I can't remember where I saw it. And when I want to learn enough about EJBs to figure out if I need to care about them, or if they are relevant to my planned project, I have to wade through another day of voluminous coverage before I have enough of a handle on what they are to make some intelligent guesses about where to look next. My point is that I believe the Apache/Java/Struts/... universe is quickly reaching a point where its very breadth is becoming a barrier to entry for people who don't have a couple of months to devote to bootstrapping themselves. Is there any thought being given to creating a higher-level resource interface that could serve as a single point of reference for all things Apache? (I realize that "all things java" would be going way too far.) As a simple solution, if every document in the Apache infrastructure had a meta tag that listed the questions answered by the document, then a very powerful, automated FAQ could be maintained. And such a system would make it much easier (I believe) to find things quickly than simply searching the site for key words. This may not be the best (or only) solution, but I do believe that for all the very specific support and discussions there are, there is really very little over-view material to assist newcomers or people looking for information outside of their core area. Or maybe I'm the only one who feels overwhelmed by it all. :-) Jefficus
