Being fairly new to Turbine, (< 2 months really), I understand the frustration with it ... it took a while to get my head around it. However, its power is awesome and as James just said, it is going to allow me to do things that just wouldn't normally be possible with such a limited development team.... The amount of work I've done in the last week after finally understanding heads from tails is amazing. I think the real gem of his comment was:
> My real guideline is how do users who have X years experience in Java take >to the Framework. Because of the limited and at times inaccurate documentation, at this point Turbine requires a pretty heavy understanding and familiarity with Server-side applications & programming (and a lack of fear towards digging for answers)... without that, this bear of an app would be very difficult to get my hands around. However, the recent activity on this list regarding the documentation project leads me to believe that perhaps Turbine is moving towards an environment which will alleviate this position. With some good start-up docs, and a little more handholding through a 'develop a new web app' process (as requested at the start of this thread), newbies would be able to get comfortable and discover the underlying power quicker. -d -----Original Message----- From: James Cooper [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 9:56 AM To: Turbine Users List Subject: RE: About ready to give up on turbine... I've been using Turbine for over a year now. For the most part I've been quite impressed. I came from a more J2EE background, a for a while I would have considered myself a purist. I think like J2EE, Turbine has its pitfalls. I look at both as being complimentary and offer a valid choice on how to proceed with building a given webapp. I think sometimes end developers and I mean this in the best possible way give to much credence or criticism to their peers rather than evaluating the Framework around what it aims to be. You can take Turbine as a whole, or bits of it. There elements I just don't like or for what ever reason would rather not use. Generating templates for one.....wow never again. Yes the documentation is sparse, yes there have been problems and like everyone there have been elements I liked or disliked. The localization service and the ApplicationTool elements are fantastic, maybe they learn a little too much to Velocity. But considering my experience with ropey presentation logic developers on Dynamo or Weblogic incorporating JHTML or JSP. The deliberate framework limitations or "guidelines" enabled our company to create a real MVC2 application without loads of Java developers needed to maintain it. The session components are smart and I've not been limited in most ways. I'm less enthusiastic about the IntakeService, we've battled for a year to get it right and personally I still believe its overkill. Ok its extensible, but count the emails pertaining to the woes with that service alone. Simple parameter parsing with any Reg Exp tool and hey presto you have your own parser. Extending Turbine_User was another flaming, we eventually gave up. But maybe in hindsight I'd 2 weeks experience with Turbine before I attempted that. Maybe not our wisest decision. My real guideline is how do users who have X years experience in Java take to the Framework. Most newbies don't find it easy, in fact this is a problem with Open source projects in general. Do we expect too much from people who do this really for the love of it? Can an average developer get to grips with this or any open source project quickly. Having been burned, I think I know what's going on at this stage and I've more than comfortable to jump into the code if the Javadocs or XDocs say nothing. But I'm a convert, I think its the non believers we should be wooing :) I think all and all, I've been very impressed, if I'm overly negative, let me post some more positives another time. The fact that I've not been too active on this list speaks volumes on Turbine. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 11 December 2002 17:38 To: Turbine Users List Subject: Re: About ready to give up on turbine... We thought we could have released dynamic website based on turbine for our customers in 2 months. Could not get turbine working in 1 month. Had to change to annother product to get finished on time. We tried TDK 2.1. I liked the idea of almost everything. Sample app worked kind of OK. I generated extra files for our project using vm- templates in torque like: skeleton intake.xml based on our project schema.xml and lots of other helpful code. Problems started at intake service. According to my opinion even intake.xml format was incorrect for that version and then we got tons of exeptions. Seemed that there were not only wrong files but wrong *.jar versions of xml parser according to mail archives etc... Since this was out of the box TDK 2.1 "production release" dozens of people around the web are loading it and going trough the same misery over and over again figuring out what's wrong with the release... things that one experienced TDK 2.1 user could have fixed in the release. I aggree to what has been said about getting the feeling about the product how it makes life easier and more interesting on triming things and such on. (I used the product to a degree) On the other hand... in the real world, when payment depends on weather customer receives their application or not... there is no time to chase bugs caused by disinterest in release quality. - Pauli -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
