Re: It is a pity that we do not have detailed enough Turbine documents

[Scott Eade <se...@backstagetech.com.au>]

lixin chu wrote:

>Hello All,
>I have seen a few posts looking for Turbine documents
>and I think the latest one was posted on 22 Dec. I
>have also seen people talking about a potential book
>on Turbine. But it is a pity that till today we still
>do not have any books on such a good product. 
>
>We can easily found 2~3 books on the much simplier
>Struts framework; and you can also get detail info
>from web sites like this
>http://rollerjm.free.fr/pro/Struts11.html
>
>May be writing a book on Turbine is not easy for such
>a feature rich framework. But it is indeed critical
>for the success of Turbine. I almost wanted to switch
>to Turbine when I first looked at it, but after
>several hours reading and searching, I am now a little
>bit hesitated - just because of lacking detailed
>documentation : the learning curve *looks* pretty
>steep for newbie like me - I need to find some good
>things again from Turbine to motivate myself to stick
>to this framework.
>
>It is a pity.
>
>Happy new year to all !
>
>li xin
>  
>
There have been plenty of people who in the past have indicated a 
willingness to contribute to documentation but have complained that it 
is all too difficult because of the format used (xdoc).  I and others 
offered to convert any supplied documents to the required format and no 
contributions were made.  The Apache wiki was actually started at our 
request so that users could easily contribute to documentation (there 
were a number of people that indicated a willingness to do so at the 
time).  Some half decent skeleton documents were produced but 
contributions toward filling in the detail have been few and far between.

We all get to share in the work of the turbine development team, but as 
with most open source projects the developers are working on a volunteer 
basis when time is available and time is usually spent coding rather 
than on documentation.  Recently most major enhancements to turbine 
_have_ in fact been accompanied by excellent documentation - I 
personally believe this problem is more a matter of documenting and 
updating the older rather than the newer aspects of turbine.  
Contributing to documentation is something everyone can do.  If you get 
a useful answer form the list why not spend 5 minutes adding to the 
documentation on the wiki. I encourage all users of turbine to make 
whatever contribution they can toward improving the documentation so 
that subsequent users can build on your experience.

My advice to you is to ask some specific questions on the list and then 
to consider contributing some of your time to add the resultant 
information to the documentation.  If all users of open source projects 
did this then documentation would be far less of a problem than it is today.

Scott

-- 
Scott Eade
Backstage Technologies Pty. Ltd.
http://www.backstagetech.com.au





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