I'm really incredibly pleased to see the amount of developer activity going right now, especially in terms of creating bug fix releases on older versions. I've been telling people for a while that I've stepped back from Tapestry development for a bit (to work on presentations, training materials, and to make a living as an independent consultant) and that the remaining committers have more than filled the vacuum ... but the last few weeks are an incredible template for what's to come, I hope.
Doing a bit of project work for a couple of clients has really energized me with ideas for improvements ... fine tuning, rounding out the rough edges, that sort of thing. I also have some ideas for further down the road, such as working towards JavaScript library independence, and moving away from Javassist (a very long term project), not to mention my experiments with Gradle as a build tool. While I was at Devoxx, I talked with a number of users, including Sebastian H., who has been working from the outside to help with our documentation organization. I have come around to his thinking, that the web site should reflect latest-and-greatest documentation. Basically, http://tapestry.apache.org/ should give you the latest (i.e., snapshot) documentation; something we can update quite often ... more often than a full stable release. I think that having a nightly documentation link is just not enough ... people don't go there. In other words, we should think in terms of updating the site documentation multiple times between dot releases. We would no longer need the tapestry-site project, the documentation from tapestry5/tapestry-project/trunk would go directly to the top level. When generating a new stable release, it should be the same structure, but one level down: http://tapestry.apache.org/5.1/ or .../5.2/, etc. The top level can be modified to point to the stable releases. Other than that, its about presentation of the existing resources in a way that people can navigate more easily; Sebastian's work includes a little jQuery menu action. In general, the documentation could use a real sprucing up visually independent of a drive to provide better documentation. I've been impressed with the Gradle documentation and user manual and want to pursue something similar; i.e., ability to produce clean docs as single HTML, linked HTML and PDF. In terms of better documentation, the cookbook should definitely be expanded, as well as the FAQ (with pointers into the cookbook). -- Howard M. Lewis Ship Creator of Apache Tapestry The source for Tapestry training, mentoring and support. Contact me to learn how I can get you up and productive in Tapestry fast! (971) 678-5210 http://howardlewisship.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
