Hi Stefan,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I must say that feel exactly the same way as Steven and most of the
time when I want to learn something new with RIFE, I end up reading
sources for hours.
It would be interesting to know which areas were the main problem for
you and why the current documentation didn't suffice.
By now, I can almost always tell the year some code was written,
just by looking at the RIFE-features it utilizes. :)
However, I understand why it is that way and Geert and other rifers
deliver awesome support here on the list, so it can be learned.
What I often miss about the docs are two things: 1) A complete
syntax manual for all XML config files and
Are you mainly talking about the site and the element files here?
Normally the concepts of those are documented in the (old) users
guide and the cookbook.
2) Some best practices to save other people from making design
mistakes that have already been made. If I can find the time, I'd
do (1), but (2) is definitely something for some more experienced
guys.
Hmm, honestly there are little things that I regret from my older
projects. Everything that I do differently now is because features
were contributed back into the framework to do the same things much
more easily (like constraints, continuations, pathinfo mapping,
annotations, ...). Conceptually-wise I still do a lot of the things I
did 3 years ago.
Take care,
Geert
Regards
Stefan :)
Geert Bevin schrieb:
Hi Steven,
I'm sorry that you're bumping into this block.
I agree that documentation is lacking in some areas, mostly for
code that was initiated earlier than three years ago. We've tried
to fill in the Javadocs holes and I think that in the areas that
we did cover, we're doing an excellent job at this. In contrast to
what you're saying, there have been many compliments about the
quality of the current documentation (even though there are
lacunas). Also, since three years, no public APIs get committed
anymore without Javadocs. Additionally, as you probably saw, each
release contains extremely detailed release notes with examples
that are afterwards aggregated in the wiki's cookbook. I think
that there is no open-source project out there that does this as
extensively. Stating that documentation is an afterthought thus
feels really very harsh to me. A project with the momentum of
Spring, with their amount of contributors and commercial companies
behind it, is of course able to provide a lot more in terms of
books and user guides. There's only so much that a small team of
motivated developers can do for free in their spare time. However,
if you do feel that some areas need to be improved quicker, you're
always welcome to contribute to the effort and document your
findings either in articles or Javadoc additions that you can send
to me as patches.
I'm working on a series of three short books for O'Reilly though,
so soon there will be a source with more centralized information.
You're right that database authentication isn't documented in
detail and it really needs to receive some love since imho it's
*the* area that is the most confusing to people. I think that you
can find what you need here though:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.rife.user/2767/focus=2767
Other posts on the mailing list cover this too. You don't really
have to be following the list for a long time, since a simple
search should reveal all the posts that are relevant to you.
With regards to the query building, the methods of the Select
class are mostly the same as the SQL methods and should need
little documentation if you know SQL. I agree though that there
should be Javadocs there. It's one of the missing parts of early
code that never received the documentation care that it deserves.
One of the points of the query builders is that the order is not
fixed at all. The real statements are only created when the SQL is
obtained from the builder manually, or when it's executed. This
also means that you can partial query builder objects that you
prepare in one location of your code and complete elsewhere.
I hope this information lets you climb out of the dip you're in
and get back up to speed. Otherwise, feel free to mail the list
with any additional questions you have, you'll see that a lot of
people here are very helpful.
Best regards,
Geert
On 18 Jun 2006, at 10:20, Steven Grimm wrote:
I feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark with RIFE. How are
other people coming up to speed on this framework? I'm finding
myself spending five times as long searching (often fruitlessly)
for documentation as I'm spending actually getting work done.
(It's the "fruitlessly" part that really irks me.) Right now my
bugaboo is database authentication; there seems to be very little
documentation on how it actually works in practice, just an
example element configuration in the user's guide.
I've written a blog entry on my experience so far:
http://www.plaintivemewling.com/articles/rife-with-frustration
Hopefully nothing too unwarranted there; sorry if it raises
anyone's hackles, but I'm not a very happy RIFE camper at the
moment.
--
Geert Bevin
Uwyn "Use what you need" - http://uwyn.com
RIFE Java application framework - http://rifers.org
Music and words - http://gbevin.com
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--
Geert Bevin
Uwyn "Use what you need" - http://uwyn.com
RIFE Java application framework - http://rifers.org
Music and words - http://gbevin.com
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