Re: Documentation & Tutorials

[Marcel Ruff <ruff at swand.lake.de>]

Michele Laghi wrote:
> 
> Shouldn't we start to write some documentation with some nice
> tutorials ?
> I think that's something users want to have when they start using a
> new product.
Yes certainly.

I believe the tutorial is the most urgent TODO.

I believe the path for newbies could be as follows:

- A new user comes to www.xmlBlaster.org
  he will click around to get a first impression
  
- Typically she wants to know:

  1. What is this stuff all about
     Our homepage should be sufficient (whitpaper,FAQ,slide show)
     The architecture overview, the current state page ...

  2. What the hell is MOM?
     whitepaper, 'internet resources' page with links to MOM sites

  3. Could this improve my application, solve my task?
     Exampes, 'What can I use xmlBlaster for' - page
     Success stories

  4. Many technical questions (security, performance ...)
     The reference handbook (= detail feature list)
     Mailing list

  5. Any restricting licenses fees etc?
     LGPL, no restrictions, no fees

  6. Play with it to get the idea and feeling for xmlBlaster
     Installation, getting started, TUTORIAL, try examples

  7. How to setup my project
     User documentations

 

All steps could need improvement, but i think the
tutorial (step 6) is needed the most:

The tutorials should start with a 'raw xmlBlaster access'
example, so this can be used for all languages (Python, Perl ...).

Another tutorial could cover a Java client and a C++ client
utilizing all provided client helper classes in the distribution.

Another tutorial could introduce step by step how one
can build a MOM based application (building
a air traffic control software as an example).


After all this blah, lets start the tutorials.

To get started quickly, we could take one of the good
SUN tutorials (e.g. the Swing tutorial) as a HTML base
for our layout (is this legal?).

What do you think?

Marcel


-- 
Marcel Ruff
ruff at swand.lake.de
http://www.lake.de/home/lake/swand/
http://www.xmlBlaster.org