I was thinking about starting on an examples directory with the goal of starting to provide a place where new (and long time) users can go to find simple sample applications showing how to make use of the numerous features in Excalibur.
To many people, having a simple example that they can build and run quickly out of the box is more valuable than a stack of documentation. Currently, many of the features are not yet documented and learning how to use certain features can involve many hours searching through the mailing list archives :-) Here is what I propose. Create a directory called examples in Excalibur's root directory. Then each example would be placed within this directory as its own independent project. Each example would contain its own build.xml file to keep things simple, and would build to a target inside that directory. The build would make use of the standard build tools included in the jakarta-avalon project and all avalon jars would be referenced in their parent directories. So the examples would require that Excalibur was first built. I was going to take a crack at writing an example that shows how to work with JdbcDataSources as there are so many questions about how they are used on the list. Other examples that would be good to have initially are showing how to configure logkit. Or simply loading a single hello world component using configuration / roles.xml files and the ComponentManager. It might be useful to also have a common directory where jars used by the examples could be placed (The hsqldb.jar, or mysql.jar files for example). One other option would be to create a new project called jakarta-avalon-examples where these could be located. That would prevent the jakarta-avalon-excalibur project for getting too cluttered. Thoughts how this should be structured? Obviously, the first few should also include documentation to get that going as a standard. :-) Using the Cocoon based docs seems like the best way to do so... Leif -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
