Re: T5 : [ANN] The book - next steps

[Hugo Palma]

Just an idea, maybe hosting the book on assembla 
(http://www.assembla.com) would fit this project needs better.
I've used assembla with great success in the past, it has all the things 
we need, an SVN repo, a forum, a chat room, an issue tracker, and more...

Alex Kotchnev wrote:
I've created a new project for the proposed book at
http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book , and posted the proposed table of
contents at
http://code.google.com/p/tapestry5-book/wiki/ProposedTableOfContents . Now
that I'm looking at it, it's a little disappointing as the TOC doesn't
really have anything new in it (e.g. some of it is covered in tutorials,
other is in the project docs, etc). However, I guess that the content really
can't be all that different - it's all about building web apps, covering the
same materials as the other documentation. In the end, I think that the book
will be different from the other existing documents based on its style and
breadth of content, and not so much in the topics it covers.

Anyway, I would like to create a mailing list and add everyone who has
expressed an interest in contributing to the book. Unfortunately, Google
Code doesn't have mailng lists, so I'll probably have to look around for
that (Nabble, maybe?). Any suggestions would be welcome here.

In terms of moving the proposed TOC forward, here are some of my next steps
:
1. Attribute the main sections of the project documentation into possible
chapters in the book.
2. Discuss feedback from this list on the content of the proposed TOC : e.g.
any alternative ideas on how to organize the book, changes to the proposed
chapter titles, order, etc.

It would be great if there are any volunteers to investigate some of the
issues that were discussed previously in the thread below, I'll probably
post the needed tasks somewhere on the wiki as well.

When we get our mailing list set up, I think that individuals or groups of
individuals can claim ownership of each chapter (and thus get "voting
rights" on the TOC, chapter layout, further modifications, etc.

Cheers,

Alex Kotchnev



On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 4:59 AM, Hugo Palma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

  
inline

Alex Kotchnev wrote:

    
Would there be any value to having a top-level domain for the book (e.g.
tapestry-book.org or something like that), or can we find it a home for
the
book somewhere under the Tapestry namespace ?


      
A top-level domain should brink more visibility to the effort. Also, in the
future we could probably spend some of the monetary payback to pay for the
domain and some hosting solution so that we could include the live version
of the book application and other cool stuff.
Still, for now i think we can live with a project on some project hosting
site where we can host the book files and wiki.

    
A note on the potential mode for governing decisions : I was thinking that
in the next couple of days, I'll post a list of possible chapters to
include
in the book. Then, we can collect a first set of volunteers for people
take
ownership of each chapter. After the initial set of volunteers, the
chapter
owners will vote on addition of new chapters and giving ownership of
chapters to new contributors (if needed).


      
Shouldn't the outline be already created in a tapestry-book wiki ?
We could decide on where to host it and then move the discussion to the
dedicated list and use its wiki for the outline.

 On whether the book would cover additional libraries (e.g. chennilekit,
    
t5components): I think that after we get to a good place where we have
enough content on the core we can probably spend some time on those as
well,
possibly with contributions from the project owners. Conceptually, it
would
be impossible to include all 3rd party / contrib libraries in the book (or
it will always be incomplete) . I guess my point is that I think we'd want
to describe Tapestry and most essential additions (e.g. t5-hibernate,
t5-spring, etc).


      
While it's true that if we go down the line of including third party
libraries it will always be incomplete and maybe unfair to some i think it
would be important to cover the ones that we consider the most used. We
could go with a voting process where each one would say the top 2 or 3 third
party libraries in his opinion. The top 2 or 3 would get included in the
book.

 Cheers,
    
Alex Kotchnev

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Thiago H. de Paula Figueiredo <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:



      
Em Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:30:41 -0300, Alex Kotchnev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
escreveu:

 Here are a couple of the next steps that I think would be useful in
moving


        
the effort forward:



          
Nice! I was thinking of posting a similar set of questions here . . . :)

 1. Post a rough outline of the table of contents in the book (initially,


        
probably on the wiki).



          
+1 I can't thing of another way of kicking off this project.
I just suggest another step: just start writing real content after
refining
the table of contents, thus avoiding some Frankensteinian results.

 2. Experiment somewhat w/ the publishing / collaboration methodology.
   +1

 3. One of my areas of concern is how the merging of xml/docbook would
work


        
in the long term. I know it's just text, but I'd imagine the doc-book
project will probably have it's own way of editing content and
converting
it into docbook



          
I always tend to prefer handwriting documents and code over tools (so
Howard's Tapestry 5, I guess :) and we could define some policies related
to
use of tags, whitespace and maximum line length. I think the merging
problems would be reduced this way.

 5. I think it would be best if we use either an existing "examples"


        
project  (e.g. like jumpstart) or take one and modify it to fit under a
particular
theme that gets developed throughout the book



          
+1 to find one single application that will be developed throughout the
book. It should be hosted in some repository (SourceForge, java.net,
etc).
Maybe it could even be integrated as a Tapestry subproject.

 Here are a couple more outstanding and pesky issues that are still very


        
murky in my head :
1. Would a book like this be published under some open source license
(e.g.I know that there are a couple of 'open source' books, e.g. the CVS
book the SVN book, etc) , maybe Creative commons ?



          
It would be really hard to define each contributor share in the profits,
so
I think some open license and proper credits would be a better fit. This
would also attract more people to Tapestry 5, as there would be more free
documentation in the internet about it.

The open source book does not prevent a printed version of the book.
37signals, for example, sells the PDF and printed versions of ther
Getting
Real book, but it can be read for free in their website (
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/). By the way, very interesting read.
:)

 2. How to make the decisions regarding a book's content ? Would it be
some


        
voting involved ? E.g. if someone thinks a particular chapter should be
in
the book, and others don't agree, how to decide if the chapter is in the
book or no (here comes the concept of "committers" again)



          
Looking at several different projects , there are two main ways to
organize
a team:
1) Benevolent dictatorship. The team has a leader that listens to
everybody, but he/she decides.
2) Straight democracy. We could (re)use the Apache model (my choice).

 3. Can we continue using this T5 users list or discussions regarding the


        
book are a distraction ?



          
IMHO, the Tapestry users list is already used for two very different
Tapestry versions, so we should open some other communication channel
(forum, another mailing list, maybe a tapestry-book one).

Another questions:

4) Would it only cover 1st party packages or 3rd party ones
(t5components,
chinellikit, etc) too?

My first thoughts: yes, and the 3rd party packages would happily write
about their creations. I would. :)

5) Would it also have a cookbook section or chapter?

My answer: yes, and we could reuse the Tapestry wiki pages here. The book
would then be something like a central place to find additional
information,
something similar to what the Hibernate document is.

 I'm really very positively surprised by the amount of feedback so far,
and


        
I'm very curious to see how far we can take this. Please comment on any
of
the ideas above, rip me to shreds if you think this is the wrong way of
doing it.



          
I second your words, Alex. This is going to be a really interesting
project, involving people from many places around the world, having
different first languages, different visions, but sharing the same goal:
promoting our favorite Java web framework by writing a good book about
it.
:)

Thiago

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