I think we can improve the user experience with our launchpad. Let's start with the simpler issue:
Right now if you start the app and try "too soon" to open a page in your browser you might get a nasty message like some service is missing etc. That's not very helpful. I've written a simple bundle at [1] which displays the message "Apache Sling is starting up...". We could even enhance it with a little javascript to reload itself. I know we have the startup filter, but that's more a general purpose thing while this module is exactly there to improve the user experience. We could add whatever we need to improve that. I think we should release it and add it to launchpad to make this problem go away. Now the more interesting part is ... naming :) While the downloads page states "Sling Application" we always refer to it as "launchpad". Even the downloaded artifact has "launchpad" in it. Now "launchpad" has no meaning to someone new to Sling and further more its a technical term describing how we launch Sling. So I think we should not use this for our Sling downloads. "Sling Application" is far better but might not be the best description either. I thought about "Sling Demo Application" but that's not quiet right either. It's definitely not a distribution as we don't intend that people use this in production. So I think we should come up with a good (short) name for this thing and then use it throughout our documentation and in the artifact id. And forget about using the term launchpad. (As soon as we move to the new feature model we don't use launchpad technology anymore anyway). We should also improve our docs on building a real application with Sling. But that's a different topic and I plan to work on this in November to improve the docs around that. WDYT? Regards Carsten [1] https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/sling/whiteboard/cziegeler/demo.startup/ -- Carsten Ziegeler Adobe Research Switzerland [email protected]
