Hi I have been involved with Derby for over a month now. I went through the wiki and other resources, to get acquainted. And now that I have resolved my first Derby issue, I think its time to put my few cents about the problems I faced and a few suggestions.
(A) Though I didn't face any trivial problems with the classpath, but I feel having windows, linux and mac specific commands would be good. Even setting up classpath for derby from trunk is different from the stable one. I found that the paths needed to be included manually(/sane) and the jars to be added after diving deep into the documentation(iirc it was in the doc related to testing..not well formatted though :) [Not DerbyTesting] ) Though may be we can redirect and link from within devel tutorials rather than requiring to navigate from the homepage of the wiki. (B) And even most of the tutorials on the wiki ask to run the script in bin for automatically setting up the classpath, they do not do so for the trunk version. May be a warning/note in there would be good or even if we could have someway to identify which version(trunk or stable) the user is running,the script can be modified to work accordingly(or warn with correct guidelines for trunk version) (C) In fact a compact tutorial with everything in there would be nice, such as 1) when to add various jars in the classpath like junit.jar; at one place rather than in distinct sections. 2) the problems we face when we run a test and rerun it without removing the files the previous test produced. How to avoid it and the best way to do it. 3) Linking to the DerbyTesting tutorial from within that. 4) Even a flowchart on where we can overview the phases one needs to get through while developing would be good. My motive in having a compact tutorial is that the user can have an overview of what things one should need in succession(setting up environment, then running tests etc). I think Derby Getting started guide would also be a good place to add/modify these things. (D) A link for getting started guide on the Home Page and then allowing the devel/user to choose among the versions would be good. It looked quite fearsome when I first reached there clicking on "Documentation" ;-) Thanks -- Regards Siddharth Srivastava
