[antoine_h]

Hi,

some idea (that I try to explain since a few years) :

The GateIn portal is a product that obviously tries to be "Sexy out of the box", and tries to be an "easy tool to build quickly some web pages".

These are the (A) use case.

Beside, the GateIn portal is sometimes used by companies that takes this nice J2EE compliant platform, to run it in a JBoss AS server, to build enterprise class portals.

These are the (B) use case.

Both users, for (A) and (B), start from the the same tools, same downloaded packages.

Even the EPP version is not that different from the community GateIn (for users who bought the commercial version, with all the support etc...).

IMHO, I think trying to provide the same tool/platform for some so wide and different use cases is... quiet risky.

The main global risk is neither give satisfaction to none of the use case :

- (A) have a too complex product (compare to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc... )

- (B) have a "Sexy out of the box" product, but the product is not nice for starting big portal project.

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here, with this "out of the box with Eclipse" constraint, the problem appears once again.

trying to give satisfaction to users of (A), is making a bad packaging mess, for users of (B).

giving satisfaction to (B), is making a bad experience to users of (A).

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what about splitting the product into several "flavors", made for each types of users, like (A), or (B) ?

like Linux flavor.

A RedHat linux (or Centos) is not aimed at the same type of users, than an Ubuntu.

and Fedora also provides another approach, with specific features.

It would be impossible to give satisfaction to these many different needs, with only one flavor.

I think that for GateIn, two flavors are needed :

- easy to build web sites flavor

- enterprise level J2EE portal platform flavor

As a sample, a tipical question for selecting the packages for the split is :  in which flavor do you think you will find IDM with integration feature with some LDAP ?

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Of course, this question of flavors, and (A) and (B) use case, is far from the question of the launcher of the portal in Eclipse.

It is a global question, ... that would solve the question that was raised about the packaging and the launcher of the portal in Eclipse.

it is not solving, ... but I hope opening some thinking about the product.

Antoine

[theute]

Antoine, I agree we with you, but we can offered that, it requires more resources and we get little help from community.

So for now we ask the users to learn more about the product and tailor it to their needs.