On Nov 2, 2007, at 1:35 PM, David Jencks wrote:
Yes. Let me give you an example. Recently I was deploying a
configuration. For a while the wheels turned and then I received an
operation successful message. However, the deployment had spewn a
boatload of stack traces to the geronimo.log file.
In another example, the Websphere App Server shows informational
messages as an app is being deployed. That is quite reassuring to an
administrator.
For now, this is a console-only concern.
The console already provides this type of feedback while
installing a plugin. Downloading JDBC drivers using the db wizard
provides it as well. It should be pretty straightforward to use
that same ajax widget to show progress info in the deployment
portlet if that's desirable. I can't really think of any other
console actions that take a non-trivial amount of time to
complete. Maybe start/stop components in some cases.
I think more important than dynamic feedback is accurate feedback
on whether the operation failed. Maybe things have gotten better
lately but my expectation honed through years of frustration is
that to really find out if a console operation succeeded I have to
look in the cli console or logs for the pages of stack trace that
were suppressed in the admin console.
Oh, well, you're right. The console does a poor job of surfacing
error messages and diagnostic feedback in many cases. I would
actually consider the lack of good error handling as a separate issue
from progress info. Sorry if I am splitting hairs. Anyway, let's
make sure that "better error handling and diagnostic feedback" is
represented in some form on the list.
Best wishes,
Paul
