Berin Loritsch wrote: > You can't understand a framework until you understand what > the thought processes are in that framework. Before I > started writing most of that documentation, we kept answering > the same questions over and over again. Guess what! The > documentation represents the type of questions we had to > answer.
However, it appears to have usability problems. Try this experiment: have someone who knows Java but not Avalon look at the Avalon web page, and ask them to build a demo program using Avalon. IMHO this should take no longer than five minutes, including them figuring out how to download Avalon and the demo. I tried exactly this, and after half an hour, gave up. Concrete problems: 1. http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/ has no 'Download' link. 2. The description of Framework is misleading: "The framework is not a product or an API set or a set of interfaces: it is a collection of code design patterns, rules, guidelines and suggestions on how to write software that plugs into the framework." If that's the case, I would expect Framework to be named Documentation, and contain no code. Yet there is lots of code in Framework. 3. The demo FTP server is apparantly in 'Cornerstone', but the 'Download' link at http://jakarta.apache.org/avalon/cornerstone/ is broken or points to an empty directory. 4. There is no simple, step-by-step example showing how to download and build a sample app, from start to finish. Instead, I find a large number of wordy web pages that talk on and on about how wonderful Avalon is, without actually giving me any concrete assistance in getting started. Now, I'd love to benchmark that demo FTP server, and give the Avalon folks some feedback about their performance, but I'm stymied; it was just too hard. This whole experience has made me very skeptical about Avalon actually being usable by someone who is not part of the Avalon team. Hence my suprise when I saw that JMeter was considering using it. When I realized the person who got them to consider it was on the Avalon team, it made a lot more sense. IMHO the JMeter team should assess the usability of Avalon before jumping headfirst into using it. Fix #3 and #4, and I will be more than happy to help the Avalon folks by stress-testing their demo apps. - Dan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
