Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
...
What really jumped out at me was the very first things a user has to do
is understand and set classpaths. Something that causes the most
problems and is tricky to get right in a manual way, is the first thing
we hit users with. To my mind seems like a very good way to lose users
at the first step, either because they want to issue some SQL right away
but we make them setup environment variables first, or they get
frustrated by ClassNotFoundExceptions due to minor typos.
Now I understand where Stan is coming from, he's once supported this
product and saw the endless class path issues, so why not explain it up
front.
I would take a different approach, start out with something that works
and get users into executing SQL through ij as soon as possible. As the
tutorial moves on, explain class paths later, once they have seen all
the powers of Derby.
Note that what I'm talking about is maybe 2% of Stan's proposed
tutorial, but it's the first 2% where one stands the greatest risk to
lose the most people.
I see the requirement to set classpath as a weakness in the product,
which the tutorial is trying to work around. So what could be done
better in the product that would help this tutorial?
...
<excellent example snipped>
...
So that's just one example where hopefully addressing something in the
product would make the tutorial better and lead to more happy Derby
users. I would encourage others to think along similar lines when
looking at the tutorial, manual or anything else that's aimed at making
Derby easier, namely to see if some other piece would make it even easier.
Dan.
For anyone not on derby-user, here's timely feedback wrt classpath
posted this morning:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/db-derby-user/200602.mbox/[EMAIL
PROTECTED]
Any way we can enhance Derby to remove the requirement to set classpath
up front would be great. In the meantime, some short-term boosts in the
documentation would be helpful.
-jean
