On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 11:40:12PM -0700, ErichTheWebGuy wrote: [...] > I would, but I hope you would understand that my clients will likely > be less than understanding if I have to say to them, "Sorry, I can't > finish your project on time, because the documentation I need has been > offline for days, and I am waiting for someone on Google Groups to > answer my question." > > Thank you for your responses, but unfortunately, it seems like > Scriptaculous has not reached the level of maturity that I am looking > for.
You have some logical fallacies and misapprehensions going on there. First I'll list them out, then I'll address them. 1) unavailable documentation implies an inability to work with the library 2) the wiki being down implies that the wiki documentation is unavailable 3) the wiki documentation is the only documentation for Scriptaculous 4) downtime of one machine implies anything at all about the maturity of the library Now, on to rebuttal. First, I was distressed that the wiki was down and I was unable to get to the documentation I was used to using. I had work to do, though, so I read the source. Yup, what with it being an open source project and all, the source is right out there for you to read. Furthermore, since it is not only based on Prototype code but also style, and the Prototype documentation is up and running, it was no problem to figure out what I needed to do. So, yeah, while it may be easier to quick look something up on the wiki, it's not that much harder to read the source and figure it out. So much for #1. As for #2, remember that anything on the web is never really gone. Google has it cached, for one, and the Wayback Machine has the whole site (though, granted, from no more recently than July of 2007): http://web.archive.org/web/20070709235615rn_2/wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/ Other have already mentioned the various other documentation resources for Scriptaculous, so I think it's pretty clear that #3 is right out. I will also point out, as I have elsewhere concerning other open source projects, that you are no more entitled to free documentation than you are entitled to the functionality provided by the free code. It's a gift from a group of authors. If they only give you the gift of functionality, you may decline that gift but you are in no position to demand that they also provide free documentation. If you are too cheap to buy the previously mentioned book <http://www.pragprog.com/titles/cppsu> then you rely on whatever you can Google or read in the source. Always keep in mind that it's all a gift. Finally, concerning #4, the wiki is not implemented in JavaScript and its downtime is completely unrelated to the maturity of the Scriptaculous library. Why would you even imagine that there is a connection to be made there? There's some guy who didn't invest in five nines of availability for a machine running a wiki. Not only is he not (solely) responsible for the library itself, his sysadmin interest and skills are unrelated to his JS programming interest and skills. I'm completely baffled by this one. Anyway, feel free to use whatever you want to use. Don't imagine that your departure, especially on such logically weak grounds, is of great concern to the Prototype/Scriptaculous community at large. --Greg --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Spinoffs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-spinoffs?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
