Poor quality docs service

[colinmcfarlane]

I took out the paid for subscription and have to say that it in no way represents value for money. The documents are way behind the current releases, too slow in being updated, and lack the depth and range of information developers/users really need. For example there's nothing about jboss.net that I could find.

Delivering this service through component source only seems to compound the problem.

Come on chaps JBoss is an excellent product and frankly I'd be prepared to pay 2, 3, or 4 times as much for a subscription that actually delivers on the promises, and meets my needs. As it currently stands though I can't see a justification for renewing the subscription next year.

[samart]

I totally agree. Its beyond poor service. no one has responded to my post either. Great appserver, non existent customer service. you buy the docs then its up to you to figure everytyhing out...not even a web page explaining the process that could help ease the pain a little bit. i'm still trying to figure out if there is a doc update for july. the docs themselves are 'ok' - but totally necessary if you are going to be working with jboss. they do help.

[rlaenen]

I agree,

Especially the CMP pdf is not worth the money.
I bought it a couple of weeks ago, it dates from 2002-06-10 and counts only about 60 pages !

jBoss seems to be an excellent product but with such a poor documentation it's hard work to figure everything out.

[juhalindfors]

The 3.2 Admin & Dev. book contains an updated chapter on the JBoss CMP engine.

[starksm64]

What specifically are your criticisms of the current docs?

[rlaenen]

Well, in my opinion it would have been better (and cheaper) to just make an extra chapter in the admin guide for the CMP stuff, but I understand that's what you just did.

To give an example of something i was missing in the docs :

How to make use of auto-generated pk's withing the db.
I'm using an oracle db where the pk's are generated by means of db-sequences. After a lot of trial-and-error i figured out that the oracle driver is not supporting the jdbc type 3 feature "PreparedStatement.RETURN_GENERATED_KEYS" that
jBoss is using for this.

Well, it would have been nice if this could be found in the docs.

[starksm64]

There is a section "Entity Commands and Primary Key Generation" in the new cmp chapter on this. No one has submitted a specific key generator for Oracle most likely because they have so many different drivers. You can certainly use on of the other entity commands discussed here as the basis for an Oracle version.

[will.houck]

Scott,
I'm a big Jboss fan and thought I would try to build on rlaenen's answer to your question. Code examples (including sql create stmts) geared toward the various db's supported would really help.

Here are a couple examples of my struggles:

1)I've been trying to work with the entity command "mysql-get-generated-keys" by using the example from the section you mentioned above. After digging around on the forums it seems I need to specify the INNODB attribute auto_increment on the column in question. Not to mention use of "type = innodb" on the table itself. Well, I still don't know if I'm right on this point but I'll bet it could've been cleared up easily in that chapter.

2)Entity command "key-generator". From your book: "The key-generator-factory attribute must provide the name of a JNDI binding of the org.jboss.ejb.plugins.keygenerator.KeyGeneratorFactory implementation." Do I need to write the impl? If so how do I plug it into jboss? There just isn't enough info. here for the average developer to leverage the feature.

Hope this helps.

Will