On Oct 13, 2008, at 9:47 AM, Lin Sun wrote:
I agree. It would be nice if we can provide users a downlodable
sample bundle, which contains the prebuilt artifacts and their plans.
This would save users from learning svn, maven and digging around for
the plans.
This seems like a reasonable approach to me. I think that publishing
the plans as attached artifacts with a "plan" classifier will be the
most maven-friendly way to make them available to the assembly plugin
when putting together this bundle.
I wish we had a way to get a geronimo-plugin.xml into the car file
when just deploying an app. That way users could construct a plugin
equivalent to ours just by deploying the app. However this might not
be too easy to do and shouldn't hold up moving forward on some kind of
bundle.
thanks
david jencks
Lin
On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Donald Woods <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
I'd like to see us generate a source + prebuilt artifacts (WAR/EAR +
deployment plans) as a downloadable assembly off our Downloads page.
Requiring users to checkout the Samples source from SVN is not
friendly to
those that don't have a svn client installed (Windows and some
default Linux
installs) and requiring them to build the Samples just so they can
look at
the deployment plans requires more work than most average users
will be
willing to spend.
-Donald
Joe Bohn wrote:
I too agree that a new user should not need to deal with plugins
initially
unless they really want to.
I think they can already do this today ... but perhaps not as
cleanly as
we would like (and not without the user seeing the word "plugin").
The important thing (as David mentioned) is that they need to
build the
samples first. I don't think that is an unreasonable request. In
fact,
until our recent release of samples, a user had no choice but to
build the
samples locally as there were no published artifacts.
Once a user has built samples they can do the following if they
don't want
to leverage the plugins:
- Install any necessary prereqs (such as the sample-datasource).
There
are a number of ways to do this for the datasource (if
necessary) ....
documented in the wiki. The easiest is to install the plugin but
a user
doesn't have to go that route. See
http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxDOC21/sample-applications.html
- Install the specific sample artifact built locally using the
archive and
the appropriate plan from the
<sample>-tomcat/target/resources/META-INF/plan.xml (or jetty
equivalent).
It's a little difficult to get the plan from that location (esp
since the
user must choose the correct plan for the server image they want
to use) but
I'm not convinced it is any worse than having to pull it from a
maven repo.
It would be ideal if we could:
- Produce a single plan in the build that could work with either
tomcat or
jetty to accompany the ear/war
- Put that plan in a more "user friendly" location (but somewhere
under
target rather than src).
- If we do anything more, we must keep the content from polluting
the src
tree. Part of the work necessary to get samples to a state where
they could
be released was to remove the special build processing that ended
up adding
various items into the src tree which caused problems for the
maven release
process.
Joe
David Jencks wrote:
On Oct 12, 2008, at 9:47 PM, Forrest_Xia wrote:
Generating standalone and deployment-ready war or ear ball will
make
geronimo
samples more easier for first try, and will improve user's use
experience.
For currently generated war or ear of samples 2.1.2 release,
user should
supply an external deployment plan.xml to make it deployable. I
think it
will lead user bad use experience when first trying a simple
sample war
or
ear ball.
Of course, I believe geronimo plugin is a good stuff to try those
samples,
but it takes time for user to build up geronimo plugin knowledge.
For an experienced JEE developer, he/she is used to consider
a .ear or
.war
ball is a ready-to-deploy artifact. Suppose that, If they
finally find
they
need to learn more about geronimo in order to make a simple
sample's
.ear or
.war deployed succussfully, what feeling will they have?
I think well considering user's use habit and ensuring first-try
success
experience is very important to attract new user to stay with
our JEE
server
and consequently work with it.
So I would suggest we add back geronimo specific deployment plan
into
packaged war or ear balls. What do you think of this?
Well, the _only_ javaee compliant location for a plan that I know
of is
_outside_ the javaee artifact... see jsr88. Any time you include
a plan
inside a javaee artifact you are using a proprietary extension.
I'm not familiar with what other container recommend, are you?
Most of the samples do need a plan to indicate at least the
dependency on
the samples datasource. I'm not really convinced that hiding
this plan
inside the javaee artifact will make it clear to users that the
dependency
is required.
I'm not completely opposed to including a plan if we can provide
some
automated way to make sure it is at least as functional as the
related plans
in the plugin subprojects. Do you have any ideas on how to
assure this? Is
it worth the extra effort?
Another possibility might be to publish the completed plans from
the
plugin subprojects as additional attached artifacts with say
classifier
"plan". That way the plans would be available through maven just
as the
javaee artifacts are. To me the main problem with deploying the
javaee
artifacts is that you have to build the plugins anyway to get the
completed
plan, and making the plans as available as the javaee artifacts
might solve
this problem.
thanks
david jencks
Forrest
--
View this message in context:
http://www.nabble.com/Improve-geronimo-samples-use-experience-tp19948784s134p19948784.html
Sent from the Apache Geronimo - Dev mailing list archive at
Nabble.com.
