Welcome Matthew! Avalon is notorious for a tough learning curve. Hopefully we can answer your questions. If you have any suggestions for documentation or improvements, please pass them along!
> I am new to the Avalon concept, and whilst eager about the contribution > that Avalon could make to my project, I am a little confused in relation > to the overall structure of "Avalon" and its sub-projects. We had someone working on a great power point presentation that would have answered this question. I need to look at getting it up on our site. Avalon can be broken down as follows: * Framework <--- core lifecycle definitions + related utilities * Excalibur <--- "Optional" utilities + basic components * Cornerstone <--- Component library * Merlin <--- Container implementation I hate comparing Avalon to J2EE, but perhaps it might help. For example, take Servlets. You have a basic servlet API on which all your servlets are dependent. In Avalon, your components should only implement or extend classes in the Framework. Then you have your Servlet container such as Tomcat. Your servlets are not dependent on Tomcat, but you will need to put together a web.xml file which tells Tomcat how to deploy the servlet. In Avalon, we have containers like Merlin which host your component applications and also require certain XML configuration information (meta-data). Additionally, Avalon provides a couple of pre-built component libraries (Excalibur and Cornerstone) to make your life easier (we hope). While this comparison is truly between apples and oranges, I hope it helps you see how the parts can work together. Perhaps some other users or developer might be able to further clarify. > In gereral, I am looking for a single reference from which to understand > how I can incorporate different Avalon projects into a consistent > development environment. Particularly I am interested in the Framework, > Merlin, Components (Cornerstone, Excalibur Utilities and Logkit). I am > also interested in building a local Avalon site containing the > documentation of each of these projects. I'm starting a tutorial on IoC programming (beginnings are at http://www.jadetower.org/spire/mutuals/) but until that is done, you should look at the Merlin tutorials. http://avalon.apache.org/merlin/starting/index.html Generally, users get to know Avalon via a container first. > I would like to know a simple way in which to obtain the latest known > good source/binaries that can be built together and incorporated into a > single site build. We're currently dealing with getting everything in CVS head working nicely together, so I wouldn't recommend the bleeding edge for getting started. If you download the latest Merlin distribution (3.2.5 I think), that should come with all the jars and everything you need. Hope that helps! J. Aaron Farr SONY ELECTRONICS DDP-CIM (724) 696-7653 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
