I'd be happy to help and contribute.
Uli
Howard Lewis Ship schrieb:
I've been coming to the same conclusion.
I'm clearing time with my boss to pursue this, along with several
online articles.
I have an idea for an application that can demonstrate every bit of
Tapestry and be useful to boot.
So the "guide" is the reference, what I have planned is the "tour".
It would replace the tutorial.
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 6:28 AM, Ulrich Stärk <u...@spielviel.de> wrote:
Hi all,
Tapestry's current documentation is very complete, covering almost
everything a developer needs to know to be productive with Tapestry.
Unfortunately this documentation is clustered across several locations thus
making it hard to find information and very hard for beginners to get going.
Sometimes even I am annoyed because I don't find the information I'm looking
for at the expected place. There is the official user guide, which is no
guide in the actual sense of the word but merely a collection of topics
using Tapestry-specific vocabulary as the topics, making it hard for a
beginner to get started. Then there is the tutorial that gets you started
with Tapestry but doesn't go deep enough to know the name of the topic to
look for in the user guide when a problem arises or more information on a
subject is needed. Thirdly, there is the wiki that contains numerous
examples on how to solve common use cases with Tapestry. And lastly there is
the component reference that not only contains documentation for a specific
component but also contains examples on how to use them to solve common use
cases. Today for example, someone on the users mailing list asked for how to
have some kind of a "dynamic component". He wanted to display a certain
component based on the outcome of a function he wrote in his page class.
This question has come up before on the list and because of the "Static
Structure, Dynamic Behavior" paradigm - which is a key principle and is not
mentioned in the documentation but at the bottom of the start page - the
solution is to use the Delegate component with blocks. In the Delegate
component reference documentation there is an example covering exactly that
use case. But it seems that the user wasn't able to find it - either he
didn't look at all or more probably, he looked in the wrong place. How could
he possibly know, that the solution to his use case is documented in a
component named Delegate?
Because I think that the current arrangement of the documentation makes it
hard to grasp the concepts of Tapestry, especially for beginners, and to
quickly find the information one seeks, I propose the following steps to be
taken to improve the documentation:
1. Re-arrange the current documentation to not just be an alphabetically
ordered list of topics but instead to be some kind of guide to Tapestry.
Group topics that belong together, start with basic topics and end with
advanced ones.
2. Print a short description of the purpose of a component next to its link
in the component reference.
3. Integrate the various documents into a coherent documentation that
follows a red line, beginning at the basics and ending with advanced topics
like manipulation of internal services. The tutorial could be used as a
starting point.
4. Extend the Tapestry Cookbook. Move solutions to common use cases from the
wiki (if they meet certain quality criteria) and the component reference
there.
Steps 1 and 2 are easy to realize, steps 3 and 4 need more work.
What do you think? What are your experiences with Tapestrys documentation?
Do you think the proposed steps would lead to an improvement? What other
aspects of the documentation do you think need improvement and how could
they be improved?
Cheers,
Uli
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