>I hope the perception is not that there is "no official" documentation, >then >there is something wrong around here.
No that is absolutely not the perception. From a beginner's point of view let me point out a few points. So these in my opinion are (or were, so pls point out what's been fixed) the major hurdles in getting started with Avalon: 1. I read the "Developing with Avalon" article to start with. IOC and other concepts were digested well enough, but it had ( haven't taken a look lately) Excalibur and some excalibur specific concepts mentioned in it. And I couldn't find examples to explain those concepts. If those examples existed I couldn't find those. 2.Then I was confused for ever abt which container to use. There is stuff abt this now in wiki but the more the better. At that point I didn't care abt benefits of one over another, I just wanted to get started somewhere. 3.In the mailing list people suggested that there are examples in the cvs, so checkout the code. I had a hard time building the Avalon cvs code because of maven not being abt to find reqd. jars at right places. Also I was working in Eclipse which made things even harder for me. Finally I gave up on it. And I think it is not so good to expect a beginner to do anything with the code checked out of Avalon cvs. 4.After suggestions in the mailing list (which were great), I decided to abandon every thing and jump to Merlin. That was the point when I actually was able to learn something, before that I was just too confused. So if people don't have other reason to consider other containers, they should be pointed to Merlin, plain and simple. And those who already use other containers would know where to go on the Avalon site. 5. I think many people wouldn't "just" start using Avalon in their applications, they would probably want to fit Avalon in some corner to start with and if it works then design applications keeping Avalon in mind. And this involves non components accessing components running under Avalon container and vice versa. I couldn't find examples for that. But now Aaron is working on those examples which is awesome. 6. I couldn't find a Merlin based webapp downloadable in a zip format which just holds a war that I could place in tomcat and run. There was that Merlin Servlet but it shouldn't be expected of beginners to get that from cvs and try to use it. But again Aaron is working on something in this regard. 7. I think a really cool example would be to have a simple application written in non-avalon way and then show users how to convert that into Avalon form and explain the benefits. 8. If there is any perception that a beginner would learn to use Merlin if you show him how to use Fortress, then it is very wrong. Developers know that behind the scene similar things might be going on but for a beginner Merlin is a separate entity than Fortress, so as far as possible containers and container specific concepts and examples should be keep far apart. Once some gets started they would be able to make a choice and judgement also. And I think other user in the list would definitely have things to add to this. Vikas --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
