Ok. So I fire up Firefox, go to http://geronimo.apache.org. We've got a little welcome blurb, with news items below it. The most recent of these is almost three months old, with almost half of them over six months old. Not sure "new" that is, but we're here for the documentation, so let's move on.
On the right hand of the screen we have a nav bar: Quick Links, Community and Development. No Getting Started document. There is a link to an FAQ and Wiki in the Community section, but no link to documentation. But there is a Documentation tab on top, so let's check that out. Hmm. We start off with a warning about the lack of documentation. This doesn't look good. Below that, we have Online documentation. Here we have Apache Geronimo V1 Documentation which is a link to...in-progress documentation on many areas of Geronimo...not real descriptive, but we'll get back to that later. Below that we have Apache Geronimo Development Process. I would have expected to see that under the Development section, not Documentation. Ok, skip that. Next we have Quick Start, covering installation, configuration of database pools and security realms. Now this looks promising! Would have been nice if this was the first item in the documentation listing. Even better if there was a link to this document on the main page. No matter. We click on the link and are taken to...chariotsolutions.com. Well that was unexpected! But let's see what we have. This appears to be part of some larger document (yes, I know this is part of Aaron's online book, but we're walking through as a novice user, so work with me :) ). So Step 1 (or Step 2.2.1 if you prefer) is to download the .tar.gz or .zip package. No link in the document. Better go back to geronimo.apache.org. Ok, so we download geronimo-tomcat-j2ee-1.0.zip and extract to C:\ So far so good. Let's go back to our Getting Started document. Ok, now time to start the server. Open a command prompt, cd to geronimo-1.0 and make sure Java 1.4.2 is on the PATH. Uh oh. All I have is Java 1.5. Guess I better go download and install Java 1.4.2. Ok. Now that we've got Java 1.4.2 installed, with the PATH updated, let's try this again. Execute 'java -jar bin\server.jar'. We get the text progress bar and startup messages. So far so good. There don't appear to be any issues with the ports, so we can skip Section 2.2.3 Customize Network Ports (if necessary). Alright. Time to log into the console. Navigate to http://localhost:8080/console in Firefox and...we get a login screen (complete with cute stylized 'G')! Alright! Now we're cooking with gas! We log in with username 'system' and password 'manager'...and we've got ourselves a working Geronimo Console! A little bit of pain at the beginning there, but all in all, not too bad. Ian It's better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not Ian D. Stewart Appl Dev Analyst-Advisory, DCS Automation JPMorganChase Global Technology Infrastructure Phone: (614) 244-2564 Pager: (888) 260-0078 Hernan Cunico <[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: user@geronimo.apache.org m> cc: Subject: Docs for 1.1? 05/15/2006 06:42 PM Please respond to user Hi All, We are getting close to get v1.1 out of the door. As it looks now we will not have documentation. I think we can have it if we all jump into it and come up with at least a minimun of things to cover and at least a few guys for tackling some of those topics. What are the areas you consider to be more criticial? Which one do you need the most? (i.e. hot deployment, db pools config, etc.) Anyone out there who can contribute? If you have any notes laying around, that will help. Anything to get started. We will also need some stuff for the web site for v1.1. A quick start would probably be really good. I don't know if we want to include all the docs in the binary dist, what do you guys think? Everyone is invited! We'll get it done if we all work on it. Cheers! Hernan
