[
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HTTPCLIENT-1201?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13287933#comment-13287933
]
Eric Hubert commented on HTTPCLIENT-1201:
-----------------------------------------
Miles, I basically also do not want to misuse the issue tracker for discussions
- those could be easily moved to the dev mailing list if there is a demand. So
back to supporting you in helping to improve the current documentation in the
sense of your issue...
Without knowing this project well it took me a few seconds to locate the maven
site at its default place:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpcomponents/httpclient/trunk/src/site/apt/index.apt
As you also seem to be interested to improve the existing tutorial, here you go
for the fundamentals chapter:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpcomponents/httpclient/trunk/src/docbkx/fundamentals.xml
Better ask one of the team members whether it would be best to provide patches
against trunk or the latest release tag though (in that case replace trunk with
tags/4.2) or check if there is a delta.My assumption would be that there should
be no difference at this stage.
Thinking about documentation improvement I would also add a suggestion. I don't
know much about the docbkx maven plugin, but I guess it is also possible to
also output a single html page comparable to the pdf document, without much
effort. At least it should be possible to define a single page xml using entity
includes of all chapter xml files plus a single page xsl, or?
It would be cool to offer the end user with three options single page html in
addtion to multipage html and pdf as of now. I have seen this at
http://www.jboss.org/resteasy/docs for example and did like this page and the
experience very much.
Rationale:
If you encounter a lazy user not like the teaching tutorial approach rather
focussed on grabbing and extracting source code snippets out of it, a single
page html is optimal for searching, e.g. in the case of the issue reporter he
could still easily find the information he was looking for via Strg+F entering
"POST" and at least the fifth hit would have shown him what he was looking for.
Of course the same is already possible with the PDF, but I think there is a
certain resistance of having to download a file and use a certain reader...
If there is interest and no one did this before, I could look into it and
provide a patch. I'm asking before as there might be a little maintenance
overhead involved and it will not be me having this overhead. ;-)
@Miles: A few last thoughts regarding documentation and quickstart
requirements. I think one should never forget that http client really has a
large feature set and there are dozens of use cases an end user can address
with this library.
Naturally every end user only thinks of his particular use case (being it only
one of multiple basic http operations like POST or PUT or something more
complex) as the ONLY ONE and may expect an immediate quickstart entry point. In
my mind this is non-trivial to address.
Maybe a more complete example list of the most common use cases ordered by the
likelyhood of end user demand would be a very good thing. This could also
integrate your requested POST example.
On the other hand it is also all about maintenance effort. Examples as well as
documentation must be concise and always correct (otherwise they are hurting
more than they are helping). Any code change visible to end users needs to be
properly updated in all available samples. Rarely users (developers)
contributing features provide proper source code (including java doc and unit
tests) plus external documentation and samples and almost never they will be
the ones who will keep maintaining their contribution over the years. So I for
one show great respect to the ones who do all this in their free time.
> provide basic documentation in an obvious place
> -----------------------------------------------
>
> Key: HTTPCLIENT-1201
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HTTPCLIENT-1201
> Project: HttpComponents HttpClient
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: Documentation
> Affects Versions: 4.2 Final
> Reporter: miles zarathustra
>
> The only documentation obviously linked from the main HttpClient page is the
> "tutorial." This "tutorial" talks about a lot of esoteric arcane junk I
> don't care about, but gives no clue on how to send parameters via a basic
> post. For that, I have to go here:
> http://wiki.apache.org/HttpComponents/QuickStart
> It's very difficult to find, and it's a lot easier to google examples that
> don't work. I wound up trying 4 different purported solutions before I found
> this one that works. If you look around the web you'll notice that people
> generally find the httpclient documentation frustrating. I have colleagues
> who argue that it would be easier to just write the post logic from scratch
> than figure out how the silly apache stuff works, and it's difficult for me
> to contradict them.
> It would be SO easy to improve the situation by making links to already
> available examples of the basic operations in an obvious place.
> The FAQ that explains some things about WHY the posts work in the totally
> non-intuitive way that they do would be nice also.
> Thanks.
--
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/ContactAdministrators!default.jspa
For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected]
For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
