Robert Garcia BigHead Technology
On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 12:30 PM, Roland Dumas wrote:
I am VERY appreciative of the kind of peer helping that goes on here. Over the past several months, if I didn't have others provide ideas and suggestions in divining how to set up witango, I'd have thrown in the towel. At least on the Mac side, there is no effective documentation on how to install, configure, and operate the environment. One bumbles through, finds that someone has been on your path before you and will share hints, or someone has the need for the same answer you're seeking and you collaborate. Answers, and pieces of answers, age out on this list, and aren't easy for the next group to discover. There are tidbits of discussion-like counsel here and there, but instruction of how to do basic things? Hard to find. I put in 40 hours over 2 weeks to discover how to use FMP and an ODBC source on the same server. Other quests have taken weeks of elapsed time. At the end, when I have a working solution, I'm happy; then I'm angry that I had to discover something that should have been covered in the documentation.
This product suffers from lack of documentation. It feels like open source without a central and updated state of the art.
My original attraction to Tango was its ease of use. That's a Mac thing, maybe, but not having to know the various layers of underpinnings is something I've come to expect. You install, complete a configuration checklist in a user interface, and you're up and running. That's the way it should be. If not, and there are considerations, they are logically laid out in an instruction manual, which is backed up by a reference document. The ease of use of Tango was very compelling. I could whip up a web interface application to a database and have it on-line overnight while the perl and PHP folks were toiling away for a week. It was that different. They were far better trained programmers, while I was more effective using this > tool.
Now, it's different.
My Xserve arrives and I can either fire it up native or install Webstar, Either way, PHP is there. If not, it installs in a moment. WebObjects is already installed. For other application serving systems, installation is done for you, or takes less time than required for a cup of coffee to cool.
Meanwhile, witango isn't quite ready for release, and when it is, it takes weeks/months to get it up and running. Not being a geek, I'm not at all sure if my working solution has hidden problems that will come back to haunt me; it just works. (I get emails from a few who tell me my solution is stupid, but their solution doesn't work on my system, even though it's pretty close to virgin.)
Yes, the other tools are harder to use and require more education to master, but in the time it takes to figure out how to get witango working, I coulda learned the other tools. I even bump into some interesting IDEs for PHP that look like a tango builder. Yup, I can, in one environment, configure a mysql database and build a PHP or perl query interface that I can tweak in Dreamweaver. The advantage of witango is supposed to be ease of use, which translates into $$ and speed. So far, it's been slow going and very expensive, given the time it takes to solve problems and create my own documentation. The alternatives are getting better.
As I see it, windows has some dominant application environments. hard to compete against Microsoft's ASP or .NET. If that doesn't dominate, then there is Cold Fusion and other market leaders. witango has less of an opportunity there to get above the noise. On the Mac, it's less crowded, and there is the opportunity to be the leader in ease of use RAD tools. Lots of Mac users stuck looking for a path forward from OS9, and see webobjects and get scared, or PHP and glaze over. There are many who host on FMP or 4D who need to keep doing that while they move into more standard unix environments. Witango can be that bridge. What's the installed base of Tango? Betcha there's a lot of Macs out there running it. Someone suggested it may be a majority of Tango installations. If you give them a box that enables them to move all their current applications forward without editing them, but run it on OS X, you'll get a lot of takers. If you make that install capable of switching to JDBC for the next version of FMP while simultaneously running ODBC databases, and include all the parts in the installer, you've got a winning package that will capture the attention (not to mention $) of a lot of people who are lost and looking for the path forward.
what's needed?
- installers that do everything (no going and editing this script or that configuration while logged on as root in a terminal)
- documentation: step-by-step on how to install for major types of configurations
- documentation: on migration of OS, datasources, etc.
If not, users will have unpredictable and large amounts of time and money drained.
On Monday, July 21, 2003, at 08:27 AM, Christian Platt wrote:
Hopoe it helps,
Just finsihed my short cookbok on how to connect to mysql via JDBC Just have a look at http://www.apocm.de/witango/index.html
Christian
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Robert Garcia President - BigHead Technology CTO - eventpix.com 2781 N Carlmont Pl Simi Valley, Ca 93065 ph: 805.522.8577 - cell: 805.501.1390 [EMAIL PROTECTED] - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bighead.net/ - http://eventpix.com/ - http://theradmac.com/
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