6 Apr
2007
6 Apr
'07
8:28 p.m.
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(a)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:
people like
>
> 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 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
that I haven't
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 found an HTML DOM parser. Is there one in the
myriad of libraries
that come with XWiki?
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