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Posted to user@turbine.apache.org by Elliott Wolin <wo...@jlab.org> on 2002/12/09 22:30:24 UTC
About ready to give up on turbine...
To the turbine user mail list,
I'm about ready to give up on turbine due to lack of basic documentation. Quite a few
others I know have already given up, not a good sign for a project that seeks wide
acceptance. I have spent more time trying to figure out the tdk than I've spent on any
other similar software product, and am close to giving up and writing the servlet myself.
I see no documentation on how to start from scratch. I would like to create a simple web
app. I create a directory "myapp" in tdk_root/webapps. At this point I have no clue what
I must do at a minimum, what dirs must exist, what property and xml files I must supply,
where I must run ant, etc (emphasis on the must).
The example "newapp" contains hundreds of files and directories...I hope I don't need that
many, and I don't want to figure all that out.
A simple app should require a few to a dozen files and dirs, and a small number of steps
to get it running...what are these files, dirs, and steps?
Sincerely,
Elliott Wolin
Jefferson Lab, Newport New, VA
P.S. A reference to the example "skeleton" app helped, but it assumes one knows more
about turbine and ant than I do. I want to learn the absolute minimum necessary about
turbine and ant to get my app running, then work my way up from there.
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Re: About ready to give up on turbine...
Posted by Alex McLintock <al...@OWAL.co.uk>.
At 02:05 10/12/02, Laurie Harper wrote:
>Elliott Wolin wrote:
>
>>I'm about ready to give up on turbine due to lack of basic
>>documentation. Quite a few others I know have already given up, not a
>>good sign for a project that seeks wide acceptance. I have spent more
>>time trying to figure out the tdk than I've spent on any other similar
>>software product, and am close to giving up and writing the servlet myself.
>
>
>I know what you mean, the learning curve seems to be a bit steep. I've
>heard it said on this list that you can expect to spend 6 to 8 months
>learning Turbine before you can make full use of it, though I'm a bit
>sceptical of that myself!
>
>>I see no documentation on how to start from scratch. I would like to
>
>
>Well, that's what the TDK getting started guide is for...
You have to read two pieces of documentation before you discover the file
which says "go look at this web page".
And when you download the web page (which should have been duplicated in
the release) you discover that it is incomplete and does not specify which
particular TDK version it applies to.
Alex
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RE: About ready to give up on turbine...
Posted by James Cooper <ja...@maxware.nl>.
I've been using Turbine for over a year now. For the most part I've been
quite impressed. I came from a more J2EE background, a for a while I would
have considered myself a purist.
I think like J2EE, Turbine has its pitfalls. I look at both as being
complimentary and offer a valid choice on how to proceed with building a
given webapp. I think sometimes end developers and I mean this in the best
possible way give to much credence or criticism to their peers rather than
evaluating the Framework around what it aims to be.
You can take Turbine as a whole, or bits of it. There elements I just don't
like or for what ever reason would rather not use. Generating templates for
one.....wow never again.
Yes the documentation is sparse, yes there have been problems and like
everyone there have been elements I liked or disliked. The localization
service and the ApplicationTool elements are fantastic, maybe they learn a
little too much to Velocity. But considering my experience with ropey
presentation logic developers on Dynamo or Weblogic incorporating JHTML or
JSP. The deliberate framework limitations or "guidelines" enabled our
company to create a real MVC2 application without loads of Java developers
needed to maintain it. The session components are smart and I've not been
limited in most ways.
I'm less enthusiastic about the IntakeService, we've battled for a year to
get it right and personally I still believe its overkill. Ok its extensible,
but count the emails pertaining to the woes with that service alone. Simple
parameter parsing with any Reg Exp tool and hey presto you have your own
parser.
Extending Turbine_User was another flaming, we eventually gave up. But maybe
in hindsight I'd 2 weeks experience with Turbine before I attempted that.
Maybe not our wisest decision.
My real guideline is how do users who have X years experience in Java take
to the Framework. Most newbies don't find it easy, in fact this is a problem
with Open source projects in general. Do we expect too much from people who
do this really for the love of it? Can an average developer get to grips
with this or any open source project quickly.
Having been burned, I think I know what's going on at this stage and I've
more than comfortable to jump into the code if the Javadocs or XDocs say
nothing. But I'm a convert, I think its the non believers we should be
wooing :)
I think all and all, I've been very impressed, if I'm overly negative, let
me post some more positives another time. The fact that I've not been too
active on this list speaks volumes on Turbine.
-----Original Message-----
From: pauli.jokinen@mirafor.com [mailto:pauli.jokinen@mirafor.com]
Sent: 11 December 2002 17:38
To: Turbine Users List
Subject: Re: About ready to give up on turbine...
We thought we could have released dynamic website based on turbine
for our customers in 2 months. Could not get turbine working in 1
month. Had to change to annother product to get finished on time.
We tried TDK 2.1. I liked the idea of almost everything. Sample app
worked kind of OK. I generated extra files for our project using vm-
templates in torque like: skeleton intake.xml based on our project
schema.xml and lots of other helpful code.
Problems started at intake service. According to my opinion even
intake.xml format was incorrect for that version and then we got
tons of exeptions. Seemed that there were not only wrong files
but wrong *.jar versions of xml parser according to mail archives
etc...
Since this was out of the box TDK 2.1 "production release" dozens
of people around the web are loading it and going trough the same
misery over and over again figuring out what's wrong with the
release... things that one experienced TDK 2.1 user could have
fixed in the release.
I aggree to what has been said about getting the feeling about
the product how it makes life easier and more interesting on
triming things and such on. (I used the product to a degree)
On the other hand... in the real world, when payment depends on
weather customer receives their application or not... there is no
time to chase bugs caused by disinterest in release quality.
- Pauli
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Re: About ready to give up on turbine...
Posted by pa...@mirafor.com.
We thought we could have released dynamic website based on turbine
for our customers in 2 months. Could not get turbine working in 1
month. Had to change to annother product to get finished on time.
We tried TDK 2.1. I liked the idea of almost everything. Sample app
worked kind of OK. I generated extra files for our project using vm-
templates in torque like: skeleton intake.xml based on our project
schema.xml and lots of other helpful code.
Problems started at intake service. According to my opinion even
intake.xml format was incorrect for that version and then we got
tons of exeptions. Seemed that there were not only wrong files
but wrong *.jar versions of xml parser according to mail archives
etc...
Since this was out of the box TDK 2.1 "production release" dozens
of people around the web are loading it and going trough the same
misery over and over again figuring out what's wrong with the
release... things that one experienced TDK 2.1 user could have
fixed in the release.
I aggree to what has been said about getting the feeling about
the product how it makes life easier and more interesting on
triming things and such on. (I used the product to a degree)
On the other hand... in the real world, when payment depends on
weather customer receives their application or not... there is no
time to chase bugs caused by disinterest in release quality.
- Pauli
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Re: About ready to give up on turbine...
Posted by "Dan K." <da...@YorkU.CA>.
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Alex McLintock wrote:
> At 21:44 09/12/02, you wrote:
>
> >Then you should take a look at this example "skeleton" turbine webapp.
> >It's a working example that you should be able to drop into Tomcat or
> >Jetty and has the basic dir structure and config files.
> >If you need more info, search for "skeleton" on the archive for this list.
> >
> >Here is the url:
> >http://www.yorku.ca/dkha/turbine/skeleton/index.htm
> >
> >(IMHO I think the "newapp" example is too much for a turbine newbie to
> >fully grasp. I personally skipped it after being frustrated myself and then
> >only came back to it later when I got a better understanding of how
> >things worked.)
> >
> >Regards,
> >Dan
>
>
> Thanks for a sample Dan. Can you get it incorporated into the official
> source as a demo application? Does it work with the TDK2.2 release or is
> that pointless?
You're welcome. The thought of incorporating it into the official source
did occur to me but at the moment I don't know if it's worth the effort or
how useful people find it. So... *shrug*
Dan
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Re: About ready to give up on turbine...
Posted by Alex McLintock <al...@OWAL.co.uk>.
At 21:44 09/12/02, you wrote:
>Then you should take a look at this example "skeleton" turbine webapp.
>It's a working example that you should be able to drop into Tomcat or
>Jetty and has the basic dir structure and config files.
>If you need more info, search for "skeleton" on the archive for this list.
>
>Here is the url:
>http://www.yorku.ca/dkha/turbine/skeleton/index.htm
>
>(IMHO I think the "newapp" example is too much for a turbine newbie to
>fully grasp. I personally skipped it after being frustrated myself and then
>only came back to it later when I got a better understanding of how
>things worked.)
>
>Regards,
>Dan
Thanks for a sample Dan. Can you get it incorporated into the official
source as a demo application? Does it work with the TDK2.2 release or is
that pointless?
Openweb Analysts Ltd, London.
Software For Complex Websites http://www.OWAL.co.uk/
Open Source Software Companies please register here
http://www.OWAL.co.uk/oss_support/
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Trouble with Torque
Posted by "f.b." <go...@almirena.com>.
Hi All,
I've just downloaded Torque and want to use it as a stand-alone tool.
I've got postgres installed and working, and did a succesful build of
Torque from source. So everything should be ok. But ... when I run
the example bookstore application ... nothing seems to be produced
... I get some empty files ... the screen messages tricked me into
thinking something had been created but when I looked, nothing.
I don't know what files the bookstore example is supposed to create,
I suppose some java files and stuff ... but in my case nothing at
all is created!
What is supposed to be created by running ant -f torque-build.xml. ?
The tutorial is not much help either ...
Regards
Goffredo
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Re: About ready to give up on turbine...
Posted by Laurie Harper <zo...@holoweb.net>.
Elliott Wolin wrote:
> I'm about ready to give up on turbine due to lack of basic
> documentation. Quite a few others I know have already given up, not a
> good sign for a project that seeks wide acceptance. I have spent more
> time trying to figure out the tdk than I've spent on any other similar
> software product, and am close to giving up and writing the servlet
> myself.
I know what you mean, the learning curve seems to be a bit steep. I've
heard it said on this list that you can expect to spend 6 to 8 months
learning Turbine before you can make full use of it, though I'm a bit
sceptical of that myself!
> I see no documentation on how to start from scratch. I would like to
Well, that's what the TDK getting started guide is for...
> create a simple web app. I create a directory "myapp" in
> tdk_root/webapps. At this point I have no clue what I must do at a
> minimum, what dirs must exist, what property and xml files I must
> supply, where I must run ant, etc (emphasis on the must).
>
> The example "newapp" contains hundreds of files and directories...I hope
> I don't need that many, and I don't want to figure all that out.
>
> A simple app should require a few to a dozen files and dirs, and a small
> number of steps to get it running...what are these files, dirs, and steps?
Looking at what's generated, at least half to two thirds of it is the
source and class files for the Torque object model used by the Turbine
security service. If you want to use that service, you'll want those
files. Almost all the rest is the required libs and the sample screens,
actions, etc. So it's not that excessive.
> P.S. A reference to the example "skeleton" app helped, but it assumes
> one knows more about turbine and ant than I do. I want to learn the
> absolute minimum necessary about turbine and ant to get my app running,
> then work my way up from there.
So start with the TDK and the generated app, and as you get to know
what's what you can start throwing out the bits you don't need. That's
how I started out. I spent an evening or so palying with the generated
app to understand how it fit together, then just junked the Torque
stuff, flux and other bits I didn't need. It may look intimidating but
once you get a little bit of a feel for what's what it's easy to trim
according to requirements.
L.
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Re: About ready to give up on turbine...
Posted by "Dan K." <da...@YorkU.CA>.
Then you should take a look at this example "skeleton" turbine webapp.
It's a working example that you should be able to drop into Tomcat or
Jetty and has the basic dir structure and config files.
If you need more info, search for "skeleton" on the archive for this list.
Here is the url:
http://www.yorku.ca/dkha/turbine/skeleton/index.htm
(IMHO I think the "newapp" example is too much for a turbine newbie to
fully grasp. I personally skipped it after being frustrated myself and then
only came back to it later when I got a better understanding of how
things worked.)
Regards,
Dan
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Elliott Wolin wrote:
> To the turbine user mail list,
>
> I'm about ready to give up on turbine due to lack of basic documentation. Quite a few
> others I know have already given up, not a good sign for a project that seeks wide
> acceptance. I have spent more time trying to figure out the tdk than I've spent on any
> other similar software product, and am close to giving up and writing the servlet myself.
>
> I see no documentation on how to start from scratch. I would like to create a simple web
> app. I create a directory "myapp" in tdk_root/webapps. At this point I have no clue what
> I must do at a minimum, what dirs must exist, what property and xml files I must supply,
> where I must run ant, etc (emphasis on the must).
>
> The example "newapp" contains hundreds of files and directories...I hope I don't need that
> many, and I don't want to figure all that out.
>
> A simple app should require a few to a dozen files and dirs, and a small number of steps
> to get it running...what are these files, dirs, and steps?
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Elliott Wolin
> Jefferson Lab, Newport New, VA
>
>
>
> P.S. A reference to the example "skeleton" app helped, but it assumes one knows more
> about turbine and ant than I do. I want to learn the absolute minimum necessary about
> turbine and ant to get my app running, then work my way up from there.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
> For additional commands, e-mail: <ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
>
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