On Mon Nov 7 23:01:18 2011, Durchholz, Joachim wrote:
Twitter and blogging won't help those who already use it, and those who don't
use it yet won't want to spend their time reading regular updates. That said,
it might be helpful for those who consider using it but haven't found the time
or resolve to actually do it; but these will be more interested in what newbie
Cayenne users have to say than in what the developers think is the newest and
greatest.
What's important is to lower the entry barrier.
E.g. make Modeler intuitive to use and cover all aspects that could be
reasonably modelled. (My experience, as just one data point: I toyed with it
for half an afternoon and found it a bit hard to get a handle on it and on what
features it actually supports. Another detail might be that the tool should
announce itself with a phrase that allows people to decide what they can and
can't expect it to do; for example, that it is not supposed to model everything
that their database can, but everything that... well, no idea what exactly its
area of expertise should be.)
The documentation is actually great as an overview. It touches everything one
would ask when trying to determine what Cayenne can and cannot do. It is frugal
with details though.
My advice would be to get Cayenne ahead. That's going to gain more followers
than trying to do anything marketing-wise - the marketing that led to my
current interest in Cayenne wasn't twitter feeds or blog posts, it was
favorable mention in online articles.
What's important is what Cayenne can and what it cannot (or will not) do. Example
projects would be nice; have a web service and a J2SE application (one of each kind).
Have the example projects touch every complication once: long-running transactions,
distributed commits, proxy objects, optimistic update conflicts. In the famous words of
Linus Torvalds: "Words are cheap. Show me the code." (I have been bitten too
many times by believing some project's overhyped self description. I bet a lot of
developers out there share the experience, particularly those who are in a position to
advocate an architectural switch. Nothing that the developers could write will help
overcome that scepticism; only working code will, and it won't convince, at best it will
lower the barrier. I, for an example, still haven't committed to Cayenne; the kinds of
problems that show up in the mailing list are currently making me a bit more sceptical.
I'm simply not prepared to spend several person-months
on an experiment that may fail, my time budget does not allow this
(unfortunately, I'd love to try Cayenne out).)
Regards,
Jo
Hi Jo
Thanks for your comments. I am not quite sure what to make of them all,
but perhaps a point of reference which would help us understand: what
are you comparing Cayenne to? Hibernate? Something else? No ORM at all?
I ask, because promoting Cayenne seems to fall into two categories: 1.
Cayenne is a more suitable tool for the particular task than other
ORMs, 2. You'll want to this this ORM thing instead of putting SQL into
your code.
They are quite different audiences for any messages we are trying to
get out.
Ari
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Aristedes Maniatis
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