Hi Curt, Welcome to the mailing list, and thanks for taking the time to post these observations. Have commented within.
EDIT: as I was writing this, Jorg also replied, so there's a bit of duplication here. On Tue, 27 Jun 2017 at 16:26 Curt Cox <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm new to Apache Isis, but familiar with the basic concept behind it. Here > are some first impressions of things that could be made better: > > 1) The simpleapp archetype link on the isis.apache.org front page is > broken. > Fixed, thanks. > 2) In general, the documentation seems to have a fair number of broken > links and missing images. > Please do report them as JIRA tickets, or even better use the 'edit' button to fix and submit a pull request. There are probably more broken links at the moment than has "historically" been the case because the source files of the various guides were re-organised into some subdirectories. This was done to better support the 'edit' button functionality. Meantime, I'll try to organise a "bug bash" to do a bulk fix up of these. > 3) After using maven to generate and run the archetype, I had to clear my > browser cookies to avoid a "too many redirects" error accessing the > application. Clearing the cookies worked, but I don't know why I had to and > was hesitant to do so. > I saw this once myself fairly recently when working just with the archetype app, but - given the fix is so straightforward - didn't prioritise it to investigate further. I appreciate that these little issues can be offputting. > 4) SimpleObject contains a lot of boilerplate. It's not clear how much of > that is required and how much is intended to show what can be customized. I > suggest providing more sample classes, where one class shows how simple a > domain class can be and others show points of customization. Ideally, I > would like to be able to start with a domain class that is no more verbose > than a @Canonical Groovy class and customize from there as needed. > > As Jorg says, we discussed this recently at our mini-conference, and came to the same conclusion. I can see there being maybe 3 different archetypes: - an absolutely minimal archetype that's there just to help prospective users evaluate the framework. This would ideally be a single Maven module, wouldn't even have tests, and would be clearly flagged "to learn the framework only". - the existing simpleapp archetype, that has an appropriate structure to start building an actual application to move into production, with tests to help establish best practice. Typically a developer could then add in the various addons [1], [2] as they need. - a new archetype, which would be "batteries included", and be based on all/most/some of the addons. (As discussed at our conference) I've actually started pulling our existing addons together as one single repo (of multiple modules) and intend to create a corresponding archetype based on this [3]. We had the idea of some sort of wizard (like spring boot) that would allow the developer to decide which modules to have included within their initial archetype... ie to be able to start an app with most modules already preconfigured. Hopefully this will be tackled in the next few months. Thanks again for the input. Please don't hesitate to post questions here if you get stuck. Cheers Dan [1] http://www.isisaddons.org [2] http://catalog.incode.org [3] https://github.com/incodehq/incode-platform > I'm still investigating Apache Isis and wanted point out some things that > will discourage some new users. > > Thanks again. Dan > - Curt >
