Good Morning Michael (and user list): I am reviewing some "corrections" to the PostGIS lab this morning; and we just sat through a long email thread on the ImageLab tutorial code example being out of date.
Here is the problem; many of the technical problems (say missing imports etc...) were not actually out of date - in the svn repository. As such I need a way to ask people to grab the demo source code from svn; while still having useful code examples to talk about. This current technique of providing all the steps needed is not working out that well from a frustration point of view. That said it is very helpful to have code examples; where google search can pick up on them - because I do not pretend for a second that anyone reads the user guide from cover to cover. I want to go over two other ways we can do this.... 1) Runnable code examples out of svn Another example of how to do this is present here: - http://www.eclipse.org/swt/snippets/ This is a single page with links to working code examples on each topic. Each code example is sure to work (since it is right from svn). This is *much* easier to maintain; but will miss the ability to explain (except in comments?). This is however good because the code examples are "complete" and can be run and stepped through with a debugger (which I find very helpful when learning). 2) Code examples only Another example of how to do this is presented here: - http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTDOC/Feature+Model+Guide My understanding is this is how google maps provides its examples. I really find this helpful when you can cut and paste the code example in; and read the javadocs for all the class / method definitions in your IDE tooltips. However as people are fond of pointing out it is very hard to get your imports right. 3) Suggestions I am also open to suggestions. A couple of ground rules though: - the developers working on the user guide are not paid to do so; so we need to be careful and not ask for a lot more work - the community working on the user guide is not paid to do so; so we need to be careful and not ask for a lot more work Here are a couple obvious suggestions: - http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTDOC/06+CSV2SHP+Lab has a link to the source code at the top of the page; is this sufficient for anyone? - http://docs.geoserver.org/1.7.x/developer/ are docs stored with the source code (ie no wiki). We have tried this and it was better to have the community able to edit and correct pages; however codehaus login procedures have changed and taken away a lot of that benefit of having a wiki. Jody ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: High Quality Requirements in a Collaborative Environment. Download a free trial of Rational Requirements Composer Now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/www-ibm-com _______________________________________________ Geotools-gt2-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-gt2-users
