Once we've developed sort of a critical mass of vendors (Sun, WSO2, Microsoft, etc.) and a solid track record of releases (M1, M2...) I think documentation is the possibly next step for making Stonehenge really useful at a practical level to the average developer.
Currently the wiki does a good job of guiding developers through the setup and the knobs to turn to try out the various interop options. So it's good at serving as evidence that interop is possible, but not yet useful at helping a developer how to accomplish interop in the edge cases. The next level I'd like to see it go to would be short guides on various scenarios that get down to the nitty gritty and help a developer who is trying to achieve interop between two of the stacks get his job done quicker. In each short guide, there might be a discussion of the interop issues, if any. For example, maybe WCF defaults to using WS-Addressing when another stack doesn't support it or supports an older version of he spec. We could point out any non-default configuration settings on one stack or the other to get things to talk. I'd even like to consider having the binding itself right there in the document so the developer could cut and paste it into their solution and get running quickly. I am coming at this from the point of view of having been a consultant doing Proof-of-Concept work with customers trying demonstrate interop, for example to get BizTalk using WCF to interop with Axis web services. I was in that exact situation a year ago and struggled to find practical documentation to help me through it. My vision is that the active participants who have built M1 and M2 would contribute to "seed" this guidance on the Wiki, with the hope that this useful material brings more developers to Stonehenge who will hopefully be motivated to contribute more after they have benefitted. I would like other's thoughts on this direction. Especially from the mentors. I don't know of another Apache project where the documentation is one of the main deliverables, but then Stonehenge is already pushing the boundaries of a typical Apache project. We've gotten consensus that it's a reasonable and useful stretch so far, so to me the documentation is a natural outcome. Thoughts? Kent Brown |Senior Product Manager - Developer Platform Product Marketing | office: 425-538-2918 | cell: 425-677-5241
