Sorry to perpetuate something that could be construed to be OT... but I'd
like to chip-in with my 2p worth if that's OK. As relatively very new users
to Struts we have found getting up-to-speed with Struts more difficult than
we originally envisaged - probably due to being used to being spoon-fed over
the years and not used-to really grown-up technologies like Struts, i.e. we
have considered MVC before but it was easier just to "get the job done" - MS
VB/ASP/.NET makes it very easy to get a solution up-and-running but we have
always found we pay for this in maintenance times later!
Having now committed to going "Struts" 1.1 - what we find we're missing are
simple, complete and specifically targeted HowTo's or a Knowledge Base of
worked examples on specific topics. Yes, javadoc is very useful - source
(yippee!) is even more useful, user guide is detailed but has - clearly
every possible option and it is not always clear which options we need in
the (usually) simple solution that we're attempting to find.
OK, google search is useful, apache.struts newsgroup even more useful and
other great articles such as IBM Developer Works and other sites, e.g.
Cedric's articles on tiles. However - well written it is not always clear to
which version they refer and these complete articles are more like mini
books and obviously take a significant amount to maintain and can sometimes
quickly get out-of-date and cause a great deal of confusion to novices such
as we consider ourselves to be. This list has been extremely useful - the
replies, to be honest are staggering in their excellent quality. I always
feel a bit (honoured and at the same time) distressed that authors (just
speaking from limited personal experience) Cedric and Craig (obviously and
others) have read and taken time to post a response - these people must be
extremely busy just developing the core product to be answering questions
that must seem fundamental. OK, I'm sure they don't mind but there must be a
better way...
We've started compiling internally, for our own use - our own KB articles -
to be honest this is just a simple tile template (cheers, Cedric) with areas
such as "Sensible Title", "Summary", "Product" (struts, tomcat, jikes,
debian), "Version(s)" covered (usually common tile) as far as we can tell,
"More Information" (body text) with file links, "Other Resources and
References" (links to other articles).
Ok, not rocket science - but this has been extremely useful to us. I gave up
2 years ago trying to remember everything (anything :->) and this is always
my first port-of-call as it's easily searchable ... but this could be
extended to comprise summarised information from these lists - OK this would
be manual - but honestly how many would we need for simple repeated stuff
for Struts = 50-100?
e.g. mail from Mark Zeltser ("Can forward action point to tiles
definition?") - ok this can be got from the user guide, Cedric's article,
Wellie Chao's article (IBM), probably from this list in a previous post -
has solicited 9 responses. Unsuprisingly this really foxed us for a few
hours - we realised in the end we could only do this via an action but a
simple howto to cover this and include some info on Global Forwards would
answer this question and the potential next one "How do I create an action
to do this?" with an example of it in use would be an excellent searchable
resource for everyone and a real jumpstart for anyone just getting-into
tiles.
The questions would really be ... where could it be hosted, any articles
would need to be vetted but where better than this list, who decides on
which howtos to write. OK, resources like theserverside (and many others)
already does this kind of thing but most I've read are more like mini books
again - nice to read - I've printed > 5,000 sheets of paper (to read in the
bath) to get up-to-speed over the last 6 months - hence our reason for
compiling our own KB.
Ok, I've probably bored you now - any comments or anyone else have any
comments?
Hue.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eddie Bush [mailto:ekbush@;swbell.net]
Sent: 06 November 2002 18:25
To: Struts Users Mailing List
Subject: Re: Entire Struts Mail Archive
You're not the first to propose something along those lines. The fact
of the matter is that, until some generous person writes such a thing
and makes it open-source or contributes it to Apache, there's not likely
to be such an option available to us. It could be worse; it could be
much better too. For now, we have what we have.
What I typically try to do when I get stuck is:
- consult the user guide
- consult relevant javadoc
- search google.com
- post to the list
Sorry for the rude welcoming :-( It does get annoying to see the same
questions asked over and over though.
Mark Ayad wrote:
>It would be great is messages could be some how tied to a release.
>
>I know of a company that wrote search engine software for Altavista here in
>Paris, they perform stuff like Natural Langauage Processing, Noun Phrase
>extraction, and Statistical Linguistical Analyisis on search results.
>
>For instance take a large collection of files that contain some loose
>connections between them, run it through their softwre, and out of the
other
>side you obtain a navigation structure based on statistical clusters of
like
>information.
>
>http://www.exalead.com/cgi/exalead/x=1?v=1&fr=&q=apple&p=Demo
>
>Here's an idea what about popular searches (moderated of course) on a month
>by basis ?
>
>Mark
>
--
Eddie Bush
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail:
<mailto:struts-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org>
For additional commands, e-mail:
<mailto:struts-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-unsubscribe@;jakarta.apache.org>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:struts-user-help@;jakarta.apache.org>
