Hi Joe, if I put my end-user hat on and I click on any sample/example link on the
Geronimo server's welcome page I would expect it to work out of the box, or I'm
not going to be overly impressed. So if I continue this train of thought, it
seems like any examples on this page should actually be packaged-with,
shipped-with, tested-with, and released-with, the server. That way they would
have to always work, or otherwise the server couldn't be released. An explicit
install action for these examples probably is probably okay but to depend on an
artifact that must have been released to an external repository at another time
isn't okay, since again as an end-user I expect it to work out of the box, and as
you've just demonstrated they may not (for various reasons). So, why not mitigate
these problems and if the need to be installed, just install them from say an
"examples" subdirectory that is again packaged with the server ?? No need for an
internet connection, no dependency on an external repo, etc...
I know your probably don't want/need another alternative to your other devlist
thread, but maybe just for the sake of this email I demarcate between examples
and samples. Where "examples" ship with and are packaged with the server, and can
be executed directly from the "Welcome page". It may be true that this class of
examples are so-called simple examples. But so what, they'll always work because
they have to, there would be no need for a separate release process for them,
they could grow them over time, and we could always be confident of the end-user
impression they'll convey...... And where "samples" are pretty much an arduous
subset of the samples we have today with all their incumbent problems you've
grown to love, and where we might only provide links from the "Welcome Page" to a
Geronimo URL which would then require an internet connect, a separate release
process, an external repo, etc....
Joe Bohn wrote:
The Geronimo welcome page (http://localhost:8080/) has long included
links under a header of Geronimo Examples.
Under this header are the following 3 links:
- Servlet Examples
- JSP Examples
- LDAP Demo
- Additional Samples
I'd like to remove the first 3 links and rename the last link to simply
"Samples" for trunk and branches/2.1 (prior to the 2.1.2 release). The
last link takes you to a page on our wiki that lists doc links for the
samples per release ... I think that is more appropriate.
The first 3 links present another html page from the local server that
contains text similar to this:
This sample has not been installed yet. If this server can connect to
the internet, click here to install and connect to the sample
application. It will take a few minutes to download and install the
sample and then load it.
Those 3 links present some problems (and currently don't work for 2.1 or
2.1.1 that have already been released).
- Clicking the install link attempts to connect to a repository and
initiate a install of the specified sample.
- The repository is not always as desired. For me it defaults to my
local maven2 repo.
- The current component IDs are incorrect. That's easy enough to change
but I suspect there would still be issues (see the next points).
- Even if it linked to the correct repo for the release, there would
still be a period of time after a server release when the samples are
not yet available in the repository.
- The LDAP demo requires some additional setup now because we no longer
include Directory in the initial server image ... hence this gives a
false impression that simply clicking on the link will make the example
functional.
Given these problem and the fact that is has been broken for several
releases. I'd like to remove the specific server example links from the
welcome page before we ship 2.1.2. Any objections?
Joe
--
Thanks,
Tim McConnell
