8 Replies Latest reply on Jul 29, 2003 10:51 PM by starksm64

    Please open up your documentation

    tobrien

      I paid for the documentation back when the docs were available form Flashline, and the two PDFs JBoss 3.0 Quick Start Guide and JBoss Administration and Development Guide were very helpful, but still somewhat rough around the edges.

      I'd urge the JBoss group to open up the documentation, and put xdocs (or whatever) in CVS so that the community can start submitting patches. I believe that the quality and completness of the documentation would improve to the benefit of the entire community.

        • 1. Re: Please open up your documentation
          jbossnz

          I guess patches can still be submitted to authors.

          With enough patches you might even become one of the authors !

          • 2. Re: Please open up your documentation
            tobrien

            Point me to to anonymous CVS, and I'll start applying patches.

            You have to have something to apply patches against......

            • 3. Re: Please open up your documentation
              tobrien

              Sorry, submitting patches. I must be confusing JBoss with another community. :-)

              Listen, I'd love to start submitting patches, but that reply doesn't make any sense. How can I submit a unified diff against something I don't have access to? Why would I even attempt to submit a patch to something that I can't run an update against. Really, I'd love to start helping out really just in terms of correctness and spelling alone, but there is no public source available.

              All, I'm saying is that you would benefit from opening this up, allowing anon CVS access. The JBoss book answers a lot of questions, but it has a long way to go. JBoss docs are spotty, and people are making decisions not to use JBoss because of a lack of solid documentation.

              • 4. Re: Please open up your documentation
                gadgetgeek

                I agree with you. JBOSS should at least open up the "Getting Started" documentation. As a "book" person who is very interested in learning JBOSS, I have been somewhat off put by the low quality and numerous errors in the documentation. There is nothing more frustrating then trying to follow along with some documented software and not having it work the way the so-called tutorial says it should. It makes you want to chuck the software all together.

                Although, I have no problem with paying for documentation and training, etc. I do not believe that should be a barrier to "trying" out some technology.

                Bad docs make it hard to use a piece of software or recommend it to others.


                The other gripe I have is with making all the documentation only available via PDF. I lot of people like me absolutely hate "reading" on a computer screen. I don't mind reading a couple of pages here and there but a 500+ page book is unacceptable. Are there any plans to make the documentation available in book format. I know it will cost more but I am willing to pay for that convenience.

                -Rodney

                • 5. Re: Please open up your documentation
                  starksm64

                  The quick start guide is sitting in our cvs repository under the manual module. The docs are word files under manual/src/guide.

                  • 6. Re: Please open up your documentation
                    starksm64

                    Yes, we are looking into print on demand to allow any doc to be printed. Its something I'm working on providing now.

                    • 7. Re: Please open up your documentation
                      gooperaus

                      The documents of jboss is ugly.
                      I am an employ of one famous stock exchanger and I push our company to adopt jboss as the basic middleware in some software projects. But it is so frustrated that the document, especial the qucik start document is so poor. We think we have to use commercial application server such as weblogic.

                      Jboss should open the quick document and allow everyone to submit some change to jboss. That will make the document perfect.

                      • 8. Re: Please open up your documentation
                        starksm64

                        Go to it. If you read the previous posts I said the getting started docs are available from cvs.