On Thursday 04 March 2004 02:21, Vikas Phonsa wrote: > 1. I read the "Developing with Avalon" article to start with. IOC and other > concepts were digested well enough, but it had ( haven't taken a look > lately) Excalibur and some excalibur specific concepts mentioned in it. And > I couldn't find examples to explain those concepts. If those examples > existed I couldn't find those.
Yes, we are well aware of this somewhat outdate content, but also slightly dependent on (2) below. > 2.Then I was confused for ever abt which container to use. There is stuff > abt this now in wiki but the more the better. At that point I didn't care > abt benefits of one over another, I just wanted to get started somewhere. Yes. This is a frequently occuring question. The problem is that the Avalon developer community can't even agree on this, and how to proceed. Please join the just started discussion on [EMAIL PROTECTED] and express your views. > 3.In the mailing list people suggested that there are examples in the cvs, > so checkout the code. I had a hard time building the Avalon cvs code > because of maven not being abt to find reqd. jars at right places. Also I > was working in Eclipse which made things even harder for me. Finally I gave > up on it. And I think it is not so good to expect a beginner to do anything > with the code checked out of Avalon cvs. You don't get the merlin/platform/tutorials in the binary distro ? If that is the case, we need to fix that. If you are referring to other examples, I would like to hear about what that were, so we can take appropriate action. > 4.After suggestions in the mailing list (which were great), I decided to > abandon every thing and jump to Merlin. That was the point when I actually > was able to learn something, before that I was just too confused. So if > people don't have other reason to consider other containers, they should be > pointed to Merlin, plain and simple. And those who already use other > containers would know where to go on the Avalon site. Ok. > 5. I think many people wouldn't "just" start using Avalon in their > applications, they would probably want to fit Avalon in some corner to > start with and if it works then design applications keeping Avalon in mind. > And this involves non components accessing components running under Avalon > container and vice versa. I couldn't find examples for that. But now Aaron > is working on those examples which is awesome. Good point. This falls in to a category of "Usage Patterns" and needs work. > 6. I couldn't find a Merlin based webapp downloadable in a zip format which > just holds a war that I could place in tomcat and run. There was that > Merlin Servlet but it shouldn't be expected of beginners to get that from > cvs and try to use it. But again Aaron is working on something in this > regard. This is so new (couple of months), that we haven't spent enough time on producing good usage patterns around the MerlinServlet. This is also true for the opposite, using Jetty inside Merlin and have Merlin manage the servlets. > 7. I think a really cool example would be to have a simple application > written in non-avalon way and then show users how to convert that into > Avalon form and explain the benefits. If you have such a "non-Avalon" app available, I think I and Aaron could take a shot at it. (And don't send us JBoss or similar :o) ) > 8. If there is any perception that a beginner would learn to use Merlin if > you show him how to use Fortress, then it is very wrong. Developers know > that behind the scene similar things might be going on but for a beginner > Merlin is a separate entity than Fortress, so as far as possible containers > and container specific concepts and examples should be keep far apart. Once > some gets started they would be able to make a choice and judgement also. I am not entirely sure what you are striving at here. If it has happened, then it is wrong. In fact, there is very little behind the scenes that are the same between Fortress and Merlin, other than the Avalon Framework and some small i18n bits. In any event, this feedback is very valuable. I don't remember the exact date when Merlin was released the first time (v3.0) but it something like 6 months ago, and there has been a lot of tumult prior to that. We are a little bit of "fire fighting mode" at the moment, each active developer putting in a helping hand wherever he can. Concrete comments like yours are very valuable in giving some direction to this. Thanks Niclas -- +---------//-------------------+ | http://www.bali.ac | | http://niclas.hedhman.org | +------//----------------------+ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
