I am entirely sympathetic to your situation, having been pretty much in the same situation about a year ago. And I believe that I agree strongly with your feelings and outlook, and I'm personally very eager to help those who are not as deeply experienced to get up the learning curve faster than I did and, as you say (if I understand you correctly) to pass it on to a yet larger and less-experienced group of users. As to 'these' users and 'those' users, I was responding to Vincent's skepticism about people actually coming in and annotating the JavaDoc pages. Of course they wouldn't if they didn't understand them, but I would love to do this in the hope of improving the adoption of XWiki, knowing exactly what would be needed to prevent others (like me, at least) from going through the pain I went through. My explanations may still be opaque to others, but once they get through it they can share what they've learned. At any rate, providing the opportunity for experienced users of the APIs to annotate the Javadocs without disturbing the actual source code would allow people like me to share that knowledge in the most appropriate place - right alongside the official documentation. My feeling was that Vincent was not adequately acknowledging the new class[es] of users that tools of this nature enable - those who can now create end-user applications without needing server access, and even those (like me) who stand more or less in the gap between the application builders and the raw system interfaces, who like to make the tools more robust and easier to use. brain[sic]
-----Original Message----- From: Oova [mailto:ping.scan@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 2:48 PM To: xwiki-users@objectweb.org Subject: [xwiki-users] RE: Xwiki.com API stability and Class/Object model
Guys,
I must be another breed, I barely follow you, 'these' users and 'those' users, automatically generated comment pages for users to fill it out, etc..... I am just lost or too old fashioned. My humble opinion is as follows. In house building as in software, if you want to enable somebody else to build an application (house) you give them a description, what kind of particular applications (houses) you especially are qualified to help building FASTER and BETTER than usual (Benefits overview and tools to gain those benefits). You also write, what kind of skill set might be useful to take advantage of the tools your provide. Then you provide the architecture (blueprint, ....) and explain what kind of interfaces (for walls, windows, plumbing, roofing,...) you created to enable others to build. To expedite the break-in you give some sample applications illustrating how the architecture, interfaces and tools helped gain the benefits for some use cases. And I am sorry, no offense, you do not ask the engineer who designed the software kit/ housing builder kit do document it, otherwise it becomes a kit from highly skilled engineers for other highly skilled engineers written in a highly specialized technise language, which the target audience might not speak. You normally ask a guinea pig out of the targeted audience to try to document, what it understands and let it build at least one application (house) using the tools provided. And you nurture the guinea pig with enough food, encouragement and help, so the snowball effect making the whole target audience aware of your great stuff can start and you as the engineer can go back cranking out the next great SW and tool for even better applications and houses. Making sense? Any agreement? I am a guinea pig, I am eager to use Xwiki, because for some reason, I think XWiki is a great concept (don't let me go into the 'Crossing the chasm modeling, or the 4 steps of the epiphany', both great models of how to establish innovation in the market place successfully and go beyond the innovator's initial excitement). But you need to let the targeted audience pick-up the momentum.
Enough Philosophy, if there is any agreement on what I said before, let me, Guillaume and other 'users' spread the word in a lower level technise. To enable us we need to understand - targeted user (groups) - architecture - concept of object model and API - guts (and not only nice webpages) of successful applications of the XWiki (or is the XWikis main purpose to create nice looking webpages? I did not think so)
Uwe
THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) wrote:
I wish this were true... I don't think a second that it'll work though as: 1) users will say that they cannot document if they don't
know what
it does 2) once users know what it does, they usually go away 3) users don't like to document anymore than developers like it
:)
Your points are generally true, but when you talk of "users" you're not necessarily talking of these users. I'm talking about people like me who would have loved it if someone had just told them this or that little tidbit of information, and gladly contribute it, especially when it's in the context of the document
But I like the idea... and would be game to try it... if someone else implements it... (all my time is currently used for the 1.0 release)
The only reason I haven't already made a start of it is that I haven't found an HTML DOM parser. Is there one in the myriad of libraries that come with XWiki?
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