Re: Ideas for Getting the word out -- IDE projects examples

[David Blevins <da...@gmail.com>]

On May 29, 2011, at 5:21 AM, Karan Malhi wrote:

> The assumption that everybody knows maven is a dangerous one.

You made a bit of a jump there :)  But important subject so splitting it out.

> Examples
> should also be packaged so that they could be imported into IDE's i.e. zip
> files for eclipse, idea and netbeans. People typically have their favorite
> IDE's already installed on their machines and giving the ability to import
> examples directly into the IDE and "Get Started " is very effective.
> The thing with only relying on maven is that if somebody does not have it
> installed, they first have to install it, then they also need to know a bit
> of it. I know that you can always tell them to simply run mvn clean install
> to run the example, but for people not exposed to maven, there is always a
> feeling of "I think maven did some magic to make it work. Wonder what it
> would take to get this example working in my IDE" - and this is where we can
> potentially leave a bad taste. "First impression is a lasting one" - lets
> try and make that first impression a great one

I wonder if more videos could help here?  We have one, but we could have many more.

  http://vimeo.com/6149008

Probably one of those good ideas lack of time as prevented from happening.


-David

> 
> On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 4:04 AM, Aldrin Leal <al...@leal.eng.br> wrote:
> 
>> For the examples, some could be turned into archetypes (which answers the
>> previous question "What are archetypes useful for?") as a means to reach a
>> wide audience: No need to download sources, leave it up to the archetype
>> (Actually Wicket Docs does just like that)
>> 
>> As for the feeds, I suggest either a planet setup or simply a Twitter User
>> List at first
>> 
>> --
>> -- Aldrin Leal, <al...@leal.eng.br> / http://www.leal.eng.br/mnemetica/
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 8:50 PM, David Blevins <david.blevins@gmail.com
>>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Some IRC chat resulted in some neat ideas on ways to dramatically improve
>>> how easy it is to consume and learn about OpenEJB.
>>> 
>>> # Examples
>>> 
>>> One thing that hit home is that we have now 46 examples in trunk!!!
>>> Amazing.  However the benefit of that is dramatically reduced as most of
>>> them are only available in zip file form.  Links to svn aren't that
>>> effective.  And examples change too as the technology improves so keeping
>>> wiki pages up to date is hard -- which version of the example do you
>> show?
>>> What if you really want all versions available to see?
>>> 
>>> So the idea was to use README files that are formatted in Markdown and
>> use
>>> that to generate a page for each example.  No more having part of the
>>> example in svn and part of it in confluence and then always breaking.  A
>>> stackoverflow inspired solution -- Markdown + Google's prettyprint.
>>> 
>>> All the examples are in a zip file that is published in the maven
>>> repository, so we could use a maven program to pull them down and extract
>>> them to the target directory where we can then do our little page
>>> generation.  A stub with those ideas in comments:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/openejb/trunk/sandbox/tools/src/main/java/org/apache/openejb/tools/examples/GenerateIndex.java
>>> 
>>> # Retweeting
>>> 
>>> We should monitor this feed http://twitter.com/#!/OpenEJB/contributorsand
>>> retweet anything that mentions OpenEJB.
>>> 
>>> So if anyone in the contributors list tweeted about OpenEJB, the OpenEJB
>>> twitter account would retweet it.
>>> 
>>> Two things will happen as a result:
>>> -  The more activity on the OpenEJB twitter account the more followers
>> it
>>> will get
>>> -  The more @joe and other contributors are seen on the account, the
>> more
>>> followers they will get
>>> 
>>> The OpenEJB twitter account has more followers than most everyone else so
>>> getting it to retweet is a good way to expose people to all our wonderful
>>> contributors and get them some followers and help the project at the same
>>> time.
>>> 
>>> The result is we as a community will have more ability overall to get the
>>> word out!
>>> 
>>> Twitterfeed.com was the obvious first idea, but it turns out twitter does
>>> not allow you to post content from twitter back onto twitter.  Not unless
>>> you use their API http://dev.twitter.com/doc .  So we could maybe hack
>>> together some tool we run hourly and retweet things that contributors
>> tweet.
>>> A little stub with comments here:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/openejb/trunk/sandbox/tools/src/main/java/org/apache/openejb/tools/twitter/Retweet.java
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Both are up for grabs!  If you're looking for something to do, either one
>>> would be excellent ways to improve the project!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -David
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Karan Singh Malhi