Enablement (or lack thereof)
Well, I kicked up a bit of a fuss with that last rant, didn't I? I didn't do a very good job of explaining the issue, though. Plenty of people thought I was attacking Eclipse itself (and some were glad to see me do it, while others thought I'd gone 'round the bend a bit). But that wasn't the point. So what is the point? Enablement. Or the lack thereof.
Frankly, I'm not qualified to evaluate Eclipse as a development environment for either Notes customization or Sidebar Plugins or Composite Apps. It might be fantastic. It also might suck mightily. I can't tell yet. Why is that, you ask? Because I don't have a development environment setup to try it out. I find all the hoops we need to jump through just to be able to look at this stuff more than a bit off-putting. It isn't that any of it is necessarily difficult. It's that it's all unbelievably manual, repetitive, and much, much too annoying for me to waste my time on. Not to mention that I'm not at all sure I have the right versions of the various Eclipse packages to even start from. Where's the single file download from IBM that contains the full pre-configured Eclipse development environment a Domino developer would need if they want to start working with this stuff?
This isn't an issue that's unique to the Composite Apps post on setting up Notes 8 to run in Eclipse, either, I just picked on that one because it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Connections LDAP, anyone? Hey, why should a product designed for collaboration be able to use a Domino LDAP server? It's not like the foremost experts in collaboration in the world would have that sort of infrastructure built in or anything. /sarcasm. Setting up the DB2 backend? Hey, if Julian Robichaux thinks your documentation is "scary" (comment #2) then you've got a problem, even if he is a developer looking at the admin help. We've all weighed in on Websphere Portal's setup routine. And it's gotten better. But why did we need to complain about it in the first place? Where's the VP of Common Sense at IBM to say, "Guys, if we can't write a setup routine for this system yet, we can't release the product!" Where is the enablement for the developers and the administrators?
I was thinking about how to really make this point clear, but Paul Mooney put in a comment (#27), and he absolutely nailed it:
And he's dead right. Look, Andrew Pollack pointed out (in a couple of different comments) that the average Notes developer doesn't have to change anything about the way they build applications in Notes 8. And that's true. One of the great things about what IBM has done in Notes 8 is that within Notes itself nothing has to change. That's more of the backwards-compatibility that Lotus and IBM have always been so good at, and it is a huge, fantastic, amazingly positive achievement. I'm not minimizing that, not even a little bit. It's fabulous.
But by not changing anything, those average Notes developers won't be able to do Composite Apps, or Sidebar Plugins, and they sure as heck won't be able to customize the Notes client. Did everyone see Alan Lepofsky's recent post showing off some of the cool things IBM has running in-house? The extensions to Notes 8? Great stuff. But Notes developers won't be able to do that in Domino Designer. They need developer tools that enable them to build that type of application. Oh, the Composite App wiring is available, true. But as an IDE, that stuff is seriously undercooked. Maybe not entirely half-baked, but certainly not well done. Pun absolutely intended.
Now I'm just a reasonably bright guy (and certainly not one of our resident Alpha Geeks), so I may be missing something here. It certainly wouldn't be the first time. But why is this Rocket Science? Yes, to take full advantage of everything available in the Notes 8 / Expeditor framework, you'll need to get up to speed on all the nitty gritty. But for the simple things? Really? I just don't buy it.
Carl Tyler showed us how to embed Asteroids in Sametime. And Carl didn't break off any mean Java-fu to get it done (not that he couldn't.....). What he did was go through some moderately annoying, frustratingly manual steps, bring in an existing Google Gadget, and edit enough configuration files to make it show up where he wanted it. No, it couldn't talk to anything inside the Sametime container, and it sure didn't interact with Domino in any way, and it was Sametime and not Notes 8 (though as Carl pointed out, there isn't *that* much of a difference). But it was cool, and it was fun, and it was exactly the sort of demo IBM should have written a simple, silly, wizard-driven setup routine for months ago! There should be a pre-built container available for the Sidebar that can host any Google Gadget anyway, for the end users, but for developers there should be a painless way to setup a Sidebar Plugin that supports html that way. Heck, it ought to be available as a basic control that you can drop onto your Sidebar and define properties around.
So how about some enablement, IBM? How about some silly little wizards to configure basic, fun examples? How about reasonable documentation? How about taking that extra step to make sure this stuff is all accessible to the people who will make it or break it?
Hm. I seem to be ranting again. Well, hopefully this time I've done a better job of aiming the rant. Please feel free to point out the many, many ways in which I am an idiot, and if anybody would like to point me to a location where IBM has already given us the things I've asked for I will be profoundly grateful. Surprised. But grateful.
Frankly, I'm not qualified to evaluate Eclipse as a development environment for either Notes customization or Sidebar Plugins or Composite Apps. It might be fantastic. It also might suck mightily. I can't tell yet. Why is that, you ask? Because I don't have a development environment setup to try it out. I find all the hoops we need to jump through just to be able to look at this stuff more than a bit off-putting. It isn't that any of it is necessarily difficult. It's that it's all unbelievably manual, repetitive, and much, much too annoying for me to waste my time on. Not to mention that I'm not at all sure I have the right versions of the various Eclipse packages to even start from. Where's the single file download from IBM that contains the full pre-configured Eclipse development environment a Domino developer would need if they want to start working with this stuff?
This isn't an issue that's unique to the Composite Apps post on setting up Notes 8 to run in Eclipse, either, I just picked on that one because it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Connections LDAP, anyone? Hey, why should a product designed for collaboration be able to use a Domino LDAP server? It's not like the foremost experts in collaboration in the world would have that sort of infrastructure built in or anything. /sarcasm. Setting up the DB2 backend? Hey, if Julian Robichaux thinks your documentation is "scary" (comment #2) then you've got a problem, even if he is a developer looking at the admin help. We've all weighed in on Websphere Portal's setup routine. And it's gotten better. But why did we need to complain about it in the first place? Where's the VP of Common Sense at IBM to say, "Guys, if we can't write a setup routine for this system yet, we can't release the product!" Where is the enablement for the developers and the administrators?
I was thinking about how to really make this point clear, but Paul Mooney put in a comment (#27), and he absolutely nailed it:
This shit needs to be EASY to get people to USE it. And believe me, Admins and Developers need to find it easy to set up.. or they will lose interest quickly enough (the MS suite is easier to get up and running... and there is a hell of a lot more support out there).
I'm not asking for any magic buttons to get complex things running - but c'mon... the basics should be relatively simple. IMO (and believe me.. I'm not looking to be flamed here..) Notes developers will only look at plugin/eclipse development if its relatively easy to get started and get their head around it... They are used to RAD apps and FILE/Database/New... I'm not saying they shouldn't have to change or adapt... but there should be
1. excellent documentation
2. excellent demonstrations online
3. Wizards to just get up and running..
I think we need to sell this to the developers... Not the genius developers in the world like the guys above, but the developers that do this from 9-5...
And he's dead right. Look, Andrew Pollack pointed out (in a couple of different comments) that the average Notes developer doesn't have to change anything about the way they build applications in Notes 8. And that's true. One of the great things about what IBM has done in Notes 8 is that within Notes itself nothing has to change. That's more of the backwards-compatibility that Lotus and IBM have always been so good at, and it is a huge, fantastic, amazingly positive achievement. I'm not minimizing that, not even a little bit. It's fabulous.
But by not changing anything, those average Notes developers won't be able to do Composite Apps, or Sidebar Plugins, and they sure as heck won't be able to customize the Notes client. Did everyone see Alan Lepofsky's recent post showing off some of the cool things IBM has running in-house? The extensions to Notes 8? Great stuff. But Notes developers won't be able to do that in Domino Designer. They need developer tools that enable them to build that type of application. Oh, the Composite App wiring is available, true. But as an IDE, that stuff is seriously undercooked. Maybe not entirely half-baked, but certainly not well done. Pun absolutely intended.
Now I'm just a reasonably bright guy (and certainly not one of our resident Alpha Geeks), so I may be missing something here. It certainly wouldn't be the first time. But why is this Rocket Science? Yes, to take full advantage of everything available in the Notes 8 / Expeditor framework, you'll need to get up to speed on all the nitty gritty. But for the simple things? Really? I just don't buy it.
Carl Tyler showed us how to embed Asteroids in Sametime. And Carl didn't break off any mean Java-fu to get it done (not that he couldn't.....). What he did was go through some moderately annoying, frustratingly manual steps, bring in an existing Google Gadget, and edit enough configuration files to make it show up where he wanted it. No, it couldn't talk to anything inside the Sametime container, and it sure didn't interact with Domino in any way, and it was Sametime and not Notes 8 (though as Carl pointed out, there isn't *that* much of a difference). But it was cool, and it was fun, and it was exactly the sort of demo IBM should have written a simple, silly, wizard-driven setup routine for months ago! There should be a pre-built container available for the Sidebar that can host any Google Gadget anyway, for the end users, but for developers there should be a painless way to setup a Sidebar Plugin that supports html that way. Heck, it ought to be available as a basic control that you can drop onto your Sidebar and define properties around.
So how about some enablement, IBM? How about some silly little wizards to configure basic, fun examples? How about reasonable documentation? How about taking that extra step to make sure this stuff is all accessible to the people who will make it or break it?
Hm. I seem to be ranting again. Well, hopefully this time I've done a better job of aiming the rant. Please feel free to point out the many, many ways in which I am an idiot, and if anybody would like to point me to a location where IBM has already given us the things I've asked for I will be profoundly grateful. Surprised. But grateful.
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Comments
This is different. The design plan wasn't finished until the client stuff worked, and now working backwards the ways to open up the new functionality can be built. Designer is, by definition then, behind the client at dealing with things.
I'm guessing Lotusphere will be the first chance many of us get to start getting a feel for what development will be like in the 8.x timeframe.
Posted by Andrew Pollack At 04:26:33 PM On 08/06/2007 | - Website - |
Your points are good though. In days gone past, when magazines reviewed software products (remember those days?), if the Installer didn't get the stuff running and installed automagically, that product would typically lose the review. Microsoft figured this out very early on, and they made sure that their installs worked, even if some functionality was turned off, to ensure that people had a good experience in just getting the simple stuff going.
Oh and please don't get Paul and I started on that old idea of running everything on a single box again.
Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:58:39 PM On 08/06/2007 | - Website - |
To me it sounds like two different issues is being discussed:
1. The general setup of a development environment geared towards Sametime/Notes 8 development.
2. The lack of support or missing language features to leverage the new capabilities without being a rocket scientist.
Am I the only one sitting back reading this and thinking: "heck it's a little tedious to configure - it's a one time thing and I'll get access to all this new stuff so it's worth it?" I'm just a simple developer so it might be me but I'm simply glad that we're getting access to all this stuff. I'm thinking real integration. No more data pumping since I can show the other datasource directly in Notes. Write my own views kinda like the pie chart views they showed at Lotusphere. Is it going to be hard to do at first? Sure! Is it going to get better - I certainly hope and I trust it will!
It can be that I'm "just lucky" that I have been spending a lot of time outside Notes development in Java, Linux and especially DB2 development where something like we're used to from Notes 7 and earlier is a pipe dream. Does that mean that these features and capabilities shouldn't be in Notes 8? No way but we have to start somewhere. I'm definately on the side of the ones happy to see this move to the Expeditor platform. I might be proven wrong in the longer run but for now I'm happy.
I understand the people who doubt the approach and who is managing an environment of thousands of users. Happily I'm not that kind of person - to me it's "shoot the Administrator".
As to missing language features you're right and I'm just as perplexed as many others that IBM can spend so much money on something like the Notes 8 client without bothering to update the Java API since first introduced. It could be that we have just gotten used to it and doesn't notice it as much anymore.
Posted by Mikkel Heisterberg At 11:29:26 PM On 08/06/2007 | - Website - |
Three years ago, we were told we were going to have learn Java and rewrite all of our applications. I began the task of trying to setup of my Java environment.
Ha! I didn't get very far. My help desk support couldn't help at all. And I don't even have admin rights to my computer. So I can't install things on my own.
I was like, look "I'm just a developer..." Give me the tools and have them setup and I'll use them. But, please don't expect me to get my own tools. Cause, how the heck am I supposed to know what tool I need.
That was 3 years ago, and we haven't rewritten one bit of code. The 4 Notes developers I work with still use LotusScript and @Formulas.
Posted by Betsy Thiede At 04:45:35 AM On 08/07/2007 | - Website - |
I think that on the spring/hibernate side the eclipse plug-ins could be a lot better, too. This is not Eclipses fault, but there is a lack of people who is highly proficient on writing good development tools. Once I've written a little plug-in to automate some straight-forward tasks and this is not hard. Writing dev-plug-in for more complex task is a complete different story.
So despite of the huge object model and the many obscure framework-for-building-frameworks projects in Eclipse Europa, I find Eclipse promising for diferent flavours of developers (not only rocket science type). I would just feel a bit more confident, if there were a bit more good ole' quality management (invite a group of 5 to 10 developers...as mentioned above).
Posted by Axel At 05:09:30 AM On 08/07/2007 | - Website - |
Posted by Charles Robinson At 10:36:10 AM On 08/07/2007 | - Website - |
@5 I'd like to see that, too
@4 The good news is that you still don't *have* to learn Java or stop using formula language. The bad news is that unless IBM gets much better tools and docs and wizards, etc, those 4 developers in your department will be building Notes 7 apps in the Notes 8 client for the foreseeable future. Which is a bit lame, isn't it?
@3 I think there's a bit more than 'luck' involved, Mikkel. You obviously are Java-literate and so the lower-level access and power available are major benefits to you. To someone coming from a different skill level or orientation, the minor hurdles involved in enabling the development environment don't seem worthwhile. If there's less you can do with it, you're willing to do less to get to it - if that makes any sense. Anyway, that's my take. And while I'm certainly no Java expert, I've written production Java code (in a non-Notes environment), so I'm not intimidated by any of the Rocket Science stuff. I'm more annoyed, I think, that there aren't the higher level abstractions that would make this power accessible to the more typical Notes developers. As Andrew has pointed out, that shouldn't be a long term issue. But in the short term, it's a bit irritating.
@2 Hey, maybe they can just hire you to put together cool demos and templates and documentation. FSM knows there's a need there. I hope there is a plan to address it, but I can't hold my breath about it.
@1 I sure hope it's just a quirk of timing, as you say, Andrew. In the sense that it would logically follow that the tooling will catch up. And I hope to see it all firsthand at Lotusphere 08. But I still think it's fair to point out how much work needs to be done in that area. I'm concerned that if we don't make noise about these issues, we'll wind up with the WebSphere Portal installation routine all over again, where it took several releases to get anything remotely resembling success.
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 03:12:01 PM On 08/07/2007 | - Website - |
Posted by Andrew Pollack At 05:50:53 PM On 08/07/2007 | - Website - |
So while we can complain how hard it is, it is successful. Things do not need to be a pretty wizard to be a success.
Posted by John Head At 12:09:06 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
If I say the installation routine hasn't been successful, it's because I've seen very qualified people fail when they try to install it. That is not a successful installation routine.
As for market share, I've worked in companies where the difficulty installing and configuring Portal has had a negative impact on its evaluation as a possible solution. Success is relative. The fact that WPS has had such an unreasonably complicated installation routine has indisputably caused IBM to lose business. The fact that they've still managed to sell a lot of seats is impressive, but the success has come in spite of the installation routine and with a reasonable installation routine there would be more of it.
Pretty sells. UI sells. Look and feel sells. Yes, you can sell a solution that looks like crud, but you're fighting an uphill battle when you do. The same solution with a decent user experience will be an easier sell. Every time.
And admins (and developers) "buy" products they like more often than products they don't. If you think that has no impact on their reports to the executives who sign the purchase orders, you have much more faith in the role of objectivity in business decisions than I do.
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 12:23:12 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
I also think that building components to be used in CA, or modifying the eclipse parts of the Notes 8 client (like the sidebar and menu structure) is going to be more like Notes C API or LSX development. You have to do environment setup for those as well. Is that ok? Well, that is subjective .. but I think it is. Not every Notes developer needs to build custom eclipse components in CA. You can do everything you need to do with Notes objects and the CA tool and Wiring tool. You do not need to go the next step. Yes, I agree, it should be easier. It will be. Today, deal with the steps or do not do it.
Lastly, one of the things you talked about was Google Gadgets. You said you do not like to read the CA for People blog .. but they have addressed this: { Link }
I believe this will be what we want .. a CA reusable component that we can configure in the CA tool. Selec the gadget we want, and wire it. This would mimic how it works in Websphere Portal .. you do not need to write a portlet for this functionality. It may not be in the 8.0 package, but hopefully we can download it soon.
The reality of the Notes 8 release is that everything is being done for the end user, at the expense of the developer and admin. That was the decision IBM made when it realized it could not improve all 3 clients for this release with the time and budget allotted. And since less than 5% of all Notes user ever touch the Designer or Admin clients or build custom applications. The decision to focus on the client gives IBM the best foothold possible in the current battle. The plans for improving Designer have been talked about by Maureen and Bob is working on the technology we need to take Domino into the future. Us developers always get the shaft ... we do not have to take it sitting down, but in the end we have to accept it. I am all for making sure IBM knows what direction we want them to take, but I also think we need to understand their position as well. Many times the Domino blogger community forgets that.
Posted by John Heda At 12:27:35 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
If they don't have the common sense to realize that this sort of thing is a problem, then certainly people have the right to point it out to them. They don't have to listen, of course. But accepting a bad option because it could have been worse? Naw, I don't think so. If I worked for IBM, I would have to toe the proverbial party line. But I don't.
By the way, further evidence that the dW blogs, well, suck as blogs - that link to the gadget article - doesn't. Link, that is. Try it yourself - you get the blog home page, not any article about gadgets. And since you can't search a blog for an individual post over there, I can't even find the article you're pointing to (searching all of dW doesn't find it in the first 20 results). I remember reading it when it came out, though, and I was distinctly NOT impressed, though I don't recall the details so I did try to find it just now.
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 12:46:04 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
Gadgets
||||6/20/2007 4:41 AM|Stanley Dunne|Composite Applications for People
You may have seen the latest IBM portal that allows adding Google gadgets into Portal applications.
Here in development we have built a prototype that extends the Composite Application Editor 'CAE' with a Gadget provider.
This allow for adding Google Gadgets into composite applications on Notes80, and we can use the property broker to change settings on some gadgets.
Watch the blog for more information coming soon.
How is this not what your asking for? It is exactly what your asking for ... go into CA, add the Google Gadget reusable component to your application .. which I then presume you would select the Gadget you want. You would then wire the gadget to the other components. Sounds great to me.
I never said you could not make a stink about it Rob ... not once did I say that. All I said was we all need to put overselves in IBM's shoes as well. And the reality is that you can 'stink' about it all you want, but that will not change anything. Why don't you build an Eclipse app that does this automatically? That would be a great benefit to the entire community.
As for the blogs, what can I say. There is a reason I host so many IBM blogs and will be adding some new ones in the near future. What I do not understand is why more of the Lotus developers do not use the IBM Blog template ... its there for their use. I know Andre is using it. MBR and the CA for People blogs should change as well. Or let me host their blog
Posted by John Head At 01:00:46 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
Thanks for finding the gadget post - the reason I wasn't impressed was that I don't want to put a gadget into a CA, I want gadgets in the Sidebar. Unless I've thoroughly misunderstood things, the only way to write a Sidebar app is to be an Eclipse developer. And I think that's a mistake. There's nothing inherent to the functionality in every possible Sidebar app that requires Mad Eclipse Skillz.
How do we start a campaign to get ALL of those dW blogs onto the IBM Blog template? Man, whatever they're using over there is just terrible...
By the way, I AM considering writing some utilities to help with these configuration issues. I'm also considering building and hosting pre-configured VMs for developers to use. Maybe I'll put a Sidebar Gadget container together, too. But first I have to become an Eclipse developer. And I'm annoyed that IBM is making that task more difficult than it needs to be.
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 01:38:13 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
@Rob - It's your blog, say what you want.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 01:58:52 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
Ah, yes, Google Gadgets in the sidebar. I believe the reason that did not happen was that it would not work cross platform today. And that was more a Google Desktop1 issue than Notes 8 and the sidebar. I had a chat with Google about that. One of google's issues was they like having the gd software installed for their use. I also believe they needed to do some work on their end to make it Eclipse ready. And by that I mean being able to add any component to the sidebar, not an eclipse component for each one (which is what you will have to do today). Hopefully that get worked on for 8.5.
Do you realize how many blogs are running on IBM's roller implementation at dW? They will never change to the IBM template for that. Hopefully they will upgrade to the newest Roller or use Connections for them. As for the ones we read specifically, I lobbied MBR to put her blog on our server before she went live on dW. There are political reasons for putting a blog at IBM or another site. It is what it is. Moreso any other team inside IBM, including the Partner program, I choose not to have any interaction with the Web team. That should tell you something.
Posted by John Head At 02:01:21 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
When your customers pay you money don't you try and give them what they want? If your customers started writing stuff about your solutions in a public blog wouldn't you want to read it, try and understand it and look at seeing if it is a common belief? I know I would.
So what's happening here? Either IBM is failing to educate it's customers, IBM is not meeting it's customers expectations or some IBM customers are stupid (that would be the Microsoft answer) or a combination of many things.
Posted by Carl Tyler At 06:01:21 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
I posted this as a comment on the August 3 entry and reposting.
Comment from development "The items that are called out in the blog are exactly the set of items that the [upcoming] Expeditor Toolkit simplifies with respect to configuration and launch. The toolkit will provide a much better experience for developers than the current set of instructions provided with Notes beta or Sametime."
You can install the Expeditor Toolkit into
Eclipse 3.2.1 with WTP 1.5.1
OR
Rational Application Developer 7.0.0.1
OR
Rational Software Architect 7.0.0.1
Re: using not using the Domino blog template -- that is a sad situation, but we are improving the Domino blog template feature set for external customer use.
Posted by Mark Jourdain At 06:06:59 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
Thanks for that. I posted it in a new main topic as well to make sure everyone sees it (not everyone follows comment threads). Which version of the Expeditor Toolkit should we be looking for? Since you said "[upcoming]" in the original comment, I thought that the enablement you described isn't available in the current 6.1 FP1? Or is it? Because here you mention being able to install it into certain versions of Eclipse or Rational, and I'm not sure it you deliberately used present tense ("can") or if that is wishful thinking on my part.
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 06:31:42 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
{ Link }
There are items for both composite applications and extending the Notes 8 sidebar. (see the articles by Brian Leonard).
Notes: Something is odd with that document. The URLs keep putting spaces in, so if a link does not work, see if there are some strange spaces. If not, Google the document title while I try and figure out why the URLs are coming out wrong.
Posted by Alan Lepofsky At 08:40:58 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
If IBM wants DOMINO developers to be able to build sidebar apps, modify the Notes client, and even get serious about Composite Apps, there is a lot of work to be done on the documentation and tutorial aspect. And it would really help if there were articles written by people who started from the perspective that most people will start from: minimal or no Java or Eclipse knowledge and a very strong Notes background.
Aside: Did you happen to notice, in the article about extending the sidebar, how absurd the section on setting up Eclipse was? The good news is that Mark Jourdain commented (right above yours), indicating that the Expeditor Toolkit will eliminate that mess. And Bob Balaban has commented on the earlier rant, to confirm that the current tooling state is not the intended end result. Unfortunately, he is talking about Next Major Feature Release, which is - I expect - at least a year off, if not 1 1/2.
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 08:56:32 PM On 08/08/2007 | - Website - |
Obviously the setup section in my articles look exhasting but it doesn't take that long and it really will be very simple with the Expeditor toolkit.
Maybe I'm simply just a bad writer because I did start from the Notes development perspective and only recently learned Eclipse. I thought I did a decent job explaining it and, if nothing else, my hope is that more can be learned from the actual code. In my experience that's the best way: start it up, set some breakpoints, see what's going on.
Moving forward, we are looking at ways to make this stuff even easier with more tools exactly like you are talking about. I'd love for the first step in the article to be 'Launch Designer' but that's just not where we are at the moment. Even now, though, I really think it is a new skill that can be quickly learned and the achievable results are worth that time and effort.
I guess what I'm saying is that I am ready to do whatever is needed to get you guys started. So please let me know what is unclear or needs more attention and I'll try again.
Posted by Brian Leonard At 07:48:11 AM On 08/09/2007 | - Website - |
Thanks for the comment. I don't think you're a bad writer at all. But you have a very difficult job, trying to explain this new model of development, and I hope there are ways to make it easier for all of us. I re-read the article, pretending to be an editor, and here are a couple of thoughts:
I think the biggest stumbling points are around language and the Eclipse IDE itself. The language used in the articles doesn't sound like language you'd read in an article in the Lotus Advisor magazine or The View. It sounds like something I'd read on eclipse.org or in The Sphere. And the Eclipse IDE is taken too much for granted, I think.
There is a whole new set of terms and definitions, and while they will become part of the vocabulary eventually, at this point they only make sense to people with an Eclipse or Websphere Portal background. To Notes people trying to get exposure to this technology, it's a lot of gibberish.
You do make an effort to define the language and explain it before you use it, but there is too much of it too quickly. For example, you say, "An extension point allows a component to define a contract for other plug-ins to contribute functionality," as part of the definition of the term "extension point," but you haven't defined "contract." And to someone who is already up to speed on CAs and Eclipse and plug-in development, you won't need to. But to a Notes developer reading that article for the first time, you effectively said, "An extension point allows a component crackle, snap, pop, blah."
Then later you describe an IViewPart by showing an example of the IDE itself. "The first thing to understand is the concept of an IViewPart, which is an interface defined by Eclipse roughly equivalent to a rectangle on the screen. In the Eclipse world, IViewParts make up a majority of what you see. For instance, the outlined areas in figure 4 are all IViewParts." I know Eclipse is the IDE and Eclipse is also the platform, but that is a concept that would make more sense to a Notes person if the example was based off the Notes UI, don't you think?
I have to question the logic of forcing this new language on developers at all. Isn't there a Notes-oriented way to say similar things? Or a web way? Or a client/server way? Can't the necessary techniques be described in familiar language?
And if they can't, I'd put a lot more focus on the language changes themselves. Make every new word a link to a pop-up definition every time you use it. Repeat the definitions. Put a glossary in a sidebar for easy reference. Recognize that you're not just showing us a new technique, you're also teaching us a new language, and use approaches that are used in foreign language immersion programs.
Posted by Rob McDonagh At 10:31:35 AM On 08/09/2007 | - Website - |
This conversation has urged me to have several more today that I think will end up benefiting our community as we learn how to effectively leverage this new architecture.
In particular, in the near term, I hope to be able to provide you guys more articles, samples, and wizards. Long term, we have some really good ideas about tooling that I believe will really help.
As in all things. it's important to keep this conversation going and pushing the envelope. I believe it was the right move to start talking about all of this stuff before the best tools we could envision were available. First of all, some amazing things are possible despite the learning curve. And by working with you, our lead users, we can make sure those tools are what you need. This has to be better than not saying anything until we thought everything was perfect... only to be wrong and to have wasted two years. So thanks for your help.
Posted by Brian Leonard At 02:59:13 PM On 08/09/2007 | - Website - |
Maybe it would make sense to describe the most important Java and Eclipse terms in a brain-friendly manner, specifically tailored for Notes developers (which shouldn't say, that notes developers are dumb. I ).
I consider getting a kind of "enough" understanding about the Eclipse plug-in architecture, OSGi and stuff isn't a walk in the park for long time java developers neither. It is or was new stuff for them too. But like allways with a bit complexer concepts, once even the slower ones (like me) get it.
Posted by Axel At 04:52:42 AM On 08/10/2007 | - Website - |