Le Lundi, 24 mars 2003, à 12:38 Europe/Zurich, Upayavira a écrit :
....But we have to take psychology into account. CVS scared me at first. Build scared me
too. How do we make the learning curve easier? Why loose people who don't get
past those first hurdles, when they may well be perfectly capable of working with
Cocoon, but didn't have the confidence to make those first few jumps?
A source-only distribution is not necessarily harder to use, it all depends how it is packaged and used.
Right. I'll commit a dist target today to show you what I mean and we'll vote from that, ok?
IIRC a full JDK (as opposed to runtime-only) is needed to run Cocoon anyway, so compiling or not compiling does not make much difference.
right.
A possible scenario would be:
-user installs Java Web Start
-user goes to the Cocoon download page, clicks on a JNLP link which starts a small install GUI
-install GUI helps user download the Cocoon source (maybe even specific CVS tags), asks for an installation directory, asks for the port on which to run Cocoon, starts the build and then jetty.
Oh, &deity; please! do you seriously think that javawebstart is more available than javac for out *average* cocoon uses? if cocoon was, say, a text editor or a photoshop clone I would *love* to see JNLP driving the download, but let's be real: what do you expect a javawebstart user (say, your boss) to do with a running cocoon?
This is not so hard to implement and would be even easier to use than what we have now.
It's not about how many things you have to do to see the samples! It's about how many things you have to do before being able to see *YOUR* stuff running on Cocoon.
*this* should be our focus.
Let me tell you something:
a few days ago I had one good friend of mine (old-time high school buddy) asking about cocoon and how he could use it for his small. I gave him the CVS snapshot url, told him to set JAVA_HOME, type "./build.sh; ./cocoon.sh servlet" and point his browser to http://localhost:8888.
He came back to me saying: great, I got it running in 5 minutes. Now, what?
He has no java clue. Very little HTML/XML clue. A little linux sysadm skills and a little php programming. He's an eletric engineer.
I told him: well, read the docs.
He comes back to me saying: I read them, but I still don't know where to start.
He didn't care about how internally complex the installation system was (he didn't care about compiling vs. installing), but he cared about the fact that after the samples, he got stuck and nothing helped him going out of there.
So, I pointed him to the sitemap and he started getting it.
Now, why do I want to get rid of binary releases? (expecially wars?)
Because I want users to feel that cocoon is a framework and not an application.
And I want to give the impression that you can get it *your way* with the same ease of use of what you did the first time to get it running.
I strongly believe that binaries and wars help in the very short term, but harm in the middle term.
Stefano.
